Course:LIBR559A/Jones, H.A. (2016)

Jones, H.A. (2016). New Media Producing New Labor: Pinterest, Yearning, and Self-surveillance. Critical Studies in Media Communication 33(4), 352-365
LIBR559A
Section:
Instructor:
Email:
Office:
Office Hours:
Class Schedule:
Classroom:
Important Course Pages
	Syllabus
	Lecture Notes
	Assignments
	Course Discussion
[[Category:]]

Jones, H.A. (2016). New Media Producing New Labor: Pinterest, Yearning, and Self-surveillance. Critical Studies in Media Communication 33(4), 352-365

In this paper, Jones presents a modal analysis of Pinterest, a social networking site with a primarily female user base. Following Fuchs (2010) and others, she identifies social media use as a form of unpaid labour (356). She criticizes Pinterest’s “scrapbook aesthetic” on the grounds that traditional scrapbooks are objects of remembrance, while Pinterest is dedicated to yearning and consumption. She discusses the significance of these differences with respect to women’s labour and self-surveillance.

Modal analysis is an approach to textual analysis that involves examining the form and context, rather than the content, of a text (e.g., a scrapbook) (353). It offers a way of articulating the general strengths and limitations of a form (e.g., scrapbooks in general) and revealing “what interactions are invited or privileged” by it (353). Jones’s analysis hinges on her criticism of Pinterest’s visual design and its relationship to emotion and motivation. She uses the term “affective capacity” to refer to the interplay between forms and users’ affective states.

Jones argues that the primary affective capacities of scrapbooks are remembrance and celebration, while Pinterest’s primary affective capacity is yearning. She observes that traditional scrapbooks are a past-oriented medium, while Pinterest is future-oriented. While traditional scrapbooks are a place to document memories, Pinterest is a place for curating our desires and presenting an idealized version of ourselves to the world. The site is popular because people generally find this pleasurable.

Jones uses the second wave feminist concept of “shifts” to demonstrate how capitalism turns leisure to labour. The “first shift” refers to waged work performed by (white, middle class) women outside the home (358). The “second shift” is domestic and emotional labour performed by women at home, in addition to paid work. The “third shift” consists of unpaid activities that “purport to be leisure activity but yield production that advantages capitalism” by “augmenting performance in the first and second shift” (358). Jones cites physical fitness as an example from the feminist literature.

The use of social media sites, including Pinterest, is “third shift” labour that benefits capitalism in multiple ways. In addition to commodifying users by selling our data to marketers, Pinterest promotes endless striving for material wealth and physical perfection. Citing Foucault’s “technologies of the self,” Jones argues that Pinterest encourages constant self-monitoring and self-surveillance (e.g., through posting weight loss progress pictures). She concludes that Pinterest is a useful site for observing and analyzing gendered patterns of exploitation on social media.

Page Author: Allison Hill

Keywords: Social media, Pinterest, digital labour, feminism, consumerism, affect, self-surveillance