Keep it Oakland: e-commerce meets social justice

Kneese, Tamara

doi:10.1177/01634437211048342

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 16 publications

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“…Digital platform listing labor is as embodied as traditional retail work, “always performed by workers situated offline, while on the bus and in line at the post office as well as in more formal worksites” (Kneese and Palm 2020, 3). Featuring a large quantity of decluttered clothes, shipping labels, and items packed in shipping supplies, the video exemplifies what Kneese (2021, 4) refers to as “logistics fetishism.” Bestdressed’s online retail how-to video reveals the success of her business while making visible often-hidden (im)material labor and resource-intensive processes essential to the operation of online retail and digital platform economies. Paratexts of the two scenarios shed lights on the obfuscated labor of managing the afterlives of the disposed in and outside of home, online and off.…”

Section: Managing Waste In and Outside Of The Homementioning

confidence: 89%

Digital Domestic (Im)material Labor: Managing Waste and Self While Producing Closet Decluttering Videos

2023

Television & New Media

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This article examines (im)material digital labor essential to the production of closet decluttering videos on YouTube by analyzing two case studies: Leighannsays and Bestdressed. I highlight three interconnected forms of tidying labor, that is, home, data, and waste management, mobilized for influencer work and cultural platform economy. Wardrobe clean-out videos capitalize on both corporeal and affective aspects of housework and content production in the construction and maintenance of the digital self. They also assemble management labor to organize material articles in domestic space, produce/manage multimedia, and construct/amplify digital existence. The essay also discusses the (im)material labor required by the personal and outsourced handling of the disposed’s hereafters as goods and trash outside of the home. Unpacking how closet decluttering video production nests together (im)material tidying labor associated with disparate sectors from home-based platform cultural production to public management of household waste shed lights on imbricated operations of the influencer ecosystem.

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Section: Managing Waste In and Outside Of The Homementioning

confidence: 89%

Digital Domestic (Im)material Labor: Managing Waste and Self While Producing Closet Decluttering Videos

2023

Television & New Media

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“…Contact’s floor space totals 150 feet and features custom-made double-decker record bins with pullout drawers to maximize the amount of stock that can be displayed. In an area with notoriously high rents (see Kneese, 2021), the confined space minimizes overhead costs, and Contact’s only employees are its husband-and-wife co-owners. Like most stores across the country, Contact closed on March 13, 2020, reassuring its more than 2000 Instagram followers that they ‘will be expanding our virtual shop by loading tons of goodies onto our discogs page & posting extra stuff here for you to buy online’ (Instagram, 2020a).…”

Section: Comment Sold To Purchasementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The decision to shop local has long been lauded as an ethical decision (see, e.g. Kneese, 2021) and vinyl’s platformization has amplified portrayals of ‘local record stores as temples of ethical music consumption’ (Harvey, 2017: 586). In light of the necessary pivot to online sales during the pandemic, Rattleback’s partnerships with other local businesses demonstrate one way for record stores to maintain a local orientation despite shifting away from local customers.…”

Section: Conclusion: Post-digital Post-pandemic Post-local?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Shelter skelter: record stores during the pandemic and the new selling of old stuff

Palm

2022

Media, Culture & Society

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In this essay I draw on observations about how the pandemic impacted sales of vinyl records, in order to describe a (further) dis-embedding of brick-and-mortar second-hand stores from their local economies and communities. Before the pandemic, the majority of vinyl was already being purchased online; while buyers and sellers were sheltering in place, the vinyl marketplace’s reliance on the internet became total, and vinyl traffic skewed more than ever toward used records. Nearly all record stores had an online presence before the pandemic, and shops that already had an online sales system in place and a customer base accustomed to buying online had an enormous head start toward staying solvent while sheltering in place. During the pandemic, Instagram joined sites like Discogs and eBay as a platform for vinyl sales, and social media graduated from primarily functioning as a means of promotion for record stores and became a requisite component of sales infrastructure. I ask how local merchants of vintage goods like records can maintain a local orientation despite shifting away from local customers.

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“…Many businesses responded to this bind by turning to their customers and asking them on social media platforms to help sustain their business by patronizing their online sites or outright donating money to a gofundme. As Kneese shows in her essay, small businesses developed a range of additional services during the pandemic, like subscription-style care packages (Kneese, 2021). I found that shops pivoted to use their shuttered storefronts as studios to produce content on Tiktok and Instagram that they could use for promotion and direct traffic to online sales.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%