Nancy K. Baym
Plenary Talk given at Console-ing Passions
April 10, 2014
Columbia, Missouri
The theme of
Console-ing Passions this year is cultivating community, a topic about which I
have had a lot to say in the context of fan practices. Today I want to look at
it from another vantage point by considering the kind of work that relating to
a community of individual fans entails. Increasingly, part of the job of
artists is to foster and sustain ongoing interaction with a community of
individual fans. Artists must balance their audiencesÕ need to connect with
them and with one another with their own economic and social needs.
One question
we were asked to consider as plenary speakers was future trajectories for feminist
media studies. The nature of these relationships is of profound importance in
understanding not just entertainment work, but the nature
of contemporary work more broadly. Feminist media scholars are particularly
well positioned to engage these issues for two reasons: relationship building
is a deeply gendered realm with long histories of feminist scholarship and
these relationships are enacted largely through media.
For the last
several years I have been working on a project about how musicians understand
their relationships and interactions with their audiences. I have interviewed
about 40 musicians, spent countless hours following artists on social media,
attended music industry conferences, and closely followed press coverage of the
music industry, with a particular eye toward exemplars of audience engagement
and advice that musicians are given. Most of the musicians with whom I spoke
had audiences before MySpace happened and could therefore reflect on being a
musician before as well as after social media.
What IÕve
found, in short, is that musicians are engaging in a tremendous amount of relational labor. Their social and
economic relationships have always been intertwined. However, as audiences have
taken to social media to interact directly with them, expectations for more
personal relationships have increased, as have the importance of such
connections in shaping economic fortunes. Doing the work of being an artist
often includes managing interpersonal relationships with audience members, even
for those successful enough to hand some or most of that off to staff.
Pundits
increasingly tell musicians that in order to be economically viable, they must
ÒconnectÓ with their fans in order to ÒmonetizeÓ them. This rhetoric of
connection is reductive. ÒConnectÓ serves as a gloss for unspecified mechanisms
through which the presence of interaction might be tied to income-earning
potential and it obscures the challenging skills and effort that ÒconnectingÓ
entails. The use of ÒconnectÓ and ÒengageÓ to erase this work echoes the
erasure of female-gendered skills from discussions of work life in other
contexts and discourses of labor (e.g. Adkins & Jokinen, 2008; Fortunati,
2007; Jarrett, 2014; Weeks, 2007).
IÕd like to offer
three examples that span a spectrum of how artists think about relational labor.
Toward one end, is someone who views a career in music as a means to
relationships, the other end views relationships as a means to a career in music. Steve Lawson is a solo bass player who creates
Òambient music for people who hate ambient music.Ó He prefers playing in his
audienceÕs homes to clubs and other typical music venues. His income comes from
a combination of these live performances, pay-what-you-want sales of his recordings
on Bandcamp, teaching, and other odd music jobs. He is an ardent Twitter user,
having posted over 130,000 tweets since he started. ÒIÕm making friends with
people who listen to my music,Ó he told me, Òand then I become a part of their
life and they become a part of mine. And I am truly enriched by that. And the
music becomes the soundtrack to that relationship.Ó
Toward the
other extreme is someone like Lloyd Cole, a singer-songwriter who released his
first album Rattlesnakes in 1984,
enjoyed considerable success in the 1980s, and has continued to earn a living
through selling recordings and touring in the years since, although that has
become much harder. For years, he Òdidn't embrace the idea of trying to find an
audience through any other method than putting music out there.Ó For him, music
is about making Òbeautiful things and add[ing] beauty to people's lives,Ó a
process he believes depends in part on the artist maintaining a mystique that
connection can undermine. In contrast to Lawson, for whom relationships with
his audience are the point, for Cole, those relationships have their pleasures,
but are laborious. He spoke often of discomfort when describing communication
with his fans, yet saw his ability to put his son through college and support
his family as dependent on that communication. He has a forum on his website where
a small group of highly engaged and supportive long-term loyal fans hang out
and many more lurk. ÒAt times I feel like IÕve got a second family with these
people,Ó he said, Òwhich is not really what I set out to have.Ó While some
musicians with whom I spoke found time spent at the merchandise table meeting
fans after a show deeply rewarding, he described it as uncomfortable. ÒEvery
now and again I get cornered by a drunk fan,Ó he explained, Òand what can I
do? Just I'm standing there and I'm
just sort of nodding my head going, "Okay. This is how I make a
living."Ó
Lawson and Cole represent two far – though not end –
points on a spectrum of attitudes toward the balance of social and economic
dynamics of interactions with fans. Somewhere in the middle is Zo‘ Keating, a
solo cellist. She described meeting fans after a show whom
she knew from Twitter. ÒThey came to the concert just based on our social media
connection, and they felt secure enough in our relationship that we could go
hang out.Ó She felt secure as well, since Òluckily my online self is not
idealized so itÕs not that hard to live up to.Ó She is an avid Twitter user and
she strives to present herself honestly there, as this allows her to both humanize
herself and explain to her followers that she supports her family on her music
revenue. ÒI get these e-mails a
lot,Ó she said, Òpeople have been listeners for a while and then it wasnÕt
until they got to know me on Twitter that they bought my album.Ó For Keating,
then, the social is a genuine pleasure, but is also strategically tied to
economics.
I choose these examples to make a few points. First, although they
represent different perspectives, they all reflect awareness that such
relationships are integral to their economic viability. They also share the
sense that, for better or worse, social media pushes these relationships to
become ever more like friendship and family. Each hints at the range of
complicated interpersonal skills and demands that such engagement entails.
MusiciansÕ
experience of increased relational labor is indicative of general trends in
contemporary labor conditions, what Gill and Pratt (2008: 2) summarize as Òpost-Fordism,
post-industrialization, network society, liquid modernity, information society,
Ônew economy,Õ Ônew capitalism,Õ and risk society.Ó In this environment, work
is precarious, flexible, immaterial, service-oriented, and often tied to the
management of oneÕs own and othersÕ emotions. Responsibility for success and
failure falls on workers, who must engage in an increased amount of networking
to create the interpersonal social conditions through which they can find
continued employment. As Marwick (2013) describes, social media figure centrally
as sites through which people can do the relationship building, and acquire and
display the markers of status, that make them marketable. Several scholars identify creative work as
exemplifying labor in the new economy.
The sociologist Lisa Adkins (2001) describes labor shifts since
the 1970s as the Òcultural feminization of workÓ in which, regardless of
gender, more workers are expected to incorporate relational work into their
routine practices. Many have looked at this in the context of caring work such
as home health aides (e.g. Aronson & Neysmith, 1996; Piercy, 2000). They
often note that like other forms of womenÕs work, the effort and skills it
takes to do this well are rarely considered, and when they are, tend to be seen
as natural talents or evidence of being a nice person rather than as labor,
especially, as Adkins (2005) notes, when they are performed by women.
There is no shortage of
terms to describe contemporary labor; those that relate most closely to what I
am calling relational labor are Òemotional laborÓ and Òaffective laborÓ
although Òimmaterial labor,Ó Òventure labor,Ó and Òcreative laborÓ certainly
overlap. Yet none of these terms emphasizes the ongoing communicative practices and skills of
building and maintaining interpersonal and group relationships so central to
what these musicians describe, focusing instead on feelings, ideas, aspirations,
emotional displays and symbolic production.
Certainly musicians are involved in all of these things. When
Lloyd Cole smiles pleasantly at the drunk who has cornered him, reminding
himself silently that this is how he makes a living, he is managing his
emotions, but he is not doing so because he has been told to by a manager
– indeed there are no employers to determine his emotional display rules.
When Steve Lawson describes his music as the soundtrack to his friendships with
his audience or Zo‘ Keating describes hanging out after shows with people she
met through Twitter, they are engaging in affective labor, but they are also
engaged in labor that may lead fairly directly to income. The challenges they
face in managing boundaries parallel those that care workers describe, but are
not part of the job in the same way that fostering a caring relationship with
an elderly client is.
I hope this brief sketch is enough to stimulate your thinking
about the hard work of Òconnecting with your audienceÓ and the value of
theorizing such work, both for understanding media industries and for
understanding contemporary labor conditions across industries. New media ramp
up demands for ongoing relationship building and maintenance in ways that may
bear greater resemblance to friends and family than to customers and clients. As
media scholars, we are particularly well positioned to make sense of how
contemporary contexts and industries combine with media affordances raise these
issues. We need to unpack the interpersonal and cultural tensions at play in
relational labor, the perspectives that workers use to frame those tensions,
and the skills they deploy as they negotiate them in each localized interaction.
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