Blog Ambition: Fashion, Feelings, and the Political Economy of the Digital Raced Body

The Megaphone Effect: Taste and Audience in Fashion Blogging

“…A particular concern of Turner (2010) was to debunk the idea that the demotic turn represents any kind of democratization of power. With Lovink (2008) and Pham (2011), he calls into question the utopian cast of some early celebrations of the web as an emancipatory medium that would place power in the hands of the people. For Turner, there is no relinquishment of political or institutional power consequent to the demotic turn; what changes is who gets access to a mass audience.…”

“…The taste leadership on display in the fashion blogs of the young women we studied, and its inferred role in explaining their acquisition of a mass audience, may not generalize as an explanation for the success of other kinds of blogs, such as technology blogs or even to other kinds of fashion blogs, such as those undertaken by men, or originating outside the developed Anglo-Saxon societies in which our blogs were situated (Pham 2011). Nor can taste leadership be regarded as the exclusive explanation for the success of young female bloggers in general, some of whom may blog as part of an identity project or as a means to affiliate with a particular subculture.…”

“…These resources, which fuel further taste ventures, act to increase the blogger's audience, which maintains the flow of resources, thus setting up a positive feedback loop. As their audience grows, bloggers also gain social connections to prominent insiders within the fashion system, which lends bloggers more prominence, which again maintains or enhances the size of their audience among ordinary consumers, while also reinforcing the audience's perception that the blogger is a taste leader (Pham [2011] describes this as a "prominence dividend"). Having and growing an audience makes a blogger valuable to marketers and to fashion insiders alike, and the interest of both acts to enhance her audience size and its approbation for her, which recharges the inner two feedback loops in figure 6.…”

Letter from the Editors: Analyzing Fashion Blogs—Further Avenues for Research

“…Thus, researchers have engaged with fashion blogs to discuss issues such as race (Pham 2011(Pham , 2013, religion (Lewis 2013), teenage-hood (Chittendon 2010), femininity (Rocamora 2011), body size (Connell 2013), as well as global neoliberal capitalism (Luvaas 2013), whilst also engaging with wider discussions on contemporary digital practices such as hypertextuality and remediation (Rocamora 2012), new media and time (Rocamora 2013), the Internet and democratization (Pham 2011), digital entrepreneurship (Lewis 2013), the new information economy (Pham 2013), and self-digitalization (Kretz 2010). What all those studies draw attention to is the centrality of both fashion and social media to practices of the self and the formation of collective identities.…”

Eat, Dwell, Orient

“…Though media studies has only begun to study the heterogeneous meanings accrued to the construction, dissemination and consumption of blogs, certain types of blogging are considered crucial sites of knowledge formation. Cultural critic and blogger Minh-Ha Pham (2011) notes for instance that even though 'culture themed blogs comprise nearly 50% of the blogosphere' (p. 7), rarely are they taken seriously. Rather, the detractors denigrate blogging about culture as 'self absorbed and superficial, shamelessly open and public' and a 'monkey experiment in self-publishing' (Dean qtd in Pham 2011, 7).…”