Self Alienation and Reification

Personal brand development is now a mainstay of college career preparation. Young social media influencers are well-versed on the language of personal branding. It seems cultivating your personal brand is a prerequisite for navigating the 21st-century economy. Public image has a long history, of course. But how has our relationship with ourselves changed since we started to put so much effort into emphasizing the most marketable parts of our identities? This episode tackles the history of personal branding, the labor of self-branding, and why so much value is being created in the “social factory.”

Footnotes:

• “Sentimental ‘Greenbacks’ of Civilization”: Cartes de Visite and the Pre-History of Self-Branding by Alison Hearn (The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Culture)
• “Cartes de Visite,” Art Gallery of New South Wales (YouTube)
• The Method: How the Twentieth Century Learned to Act by Isaac Butler
• “Meat, Mask, Burden: Probing the Contours of the Branded Self” by Alison Hearn (Journal of Consumer Culture)
• The Anti-Capitalist Chronicles by David Harvey
• EP.385: Who do you work for? on What Works
• Connect with Tyler McCall on Twitter
• “On the internet, we’re always famous” by Chris Hayes (The New Yorker)
• “The Problem with Personal Brands and the Labor of Authenticity” by Tara McMullin

Essay versions of each episode are available every Thursday at explorewhatworks.com. To get them delivered straight to your inbox, sign up free at explorewhatworks.com/weekly