{"resolved":true,"match_type":"uuid","source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","title":"Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","requested_by":"printed_page","book":{"source_type":"original_book","book_id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","id":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","uuid":"b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","title":"Digital Labor The Internet as Playground and Factory","normalized_title":"digitallabortheinternetasplaygroundandfactory","author":null,"edition":null,"publisher":null,"year":null,"isbn":"9780415896948","isbns":["9780415896948","9780415896955","9780203145791"],"parsed":true,"ai_readable":true,"document_type":"book","page_count":325,"navigation_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","title_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/title/Digital%20Labor%20The%20Internet%20as%20Playground%20and%20Factory","fixed_page_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","path_api_url_template":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/book/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page/{printed_page}","read_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/read/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc","page_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/page","search_url":"https://workshop.closeclaw.top/api/ai/books/b4022252-f467-48d2-8a54-cef2d1038efc/search"},"page":{"printed_page":1,"pdf_page":164,"physical_index":164,"physical_index_base":0,"printed_page_status":"recognized","page_sha256":"40bda6c0417f287f355cb8f4f5cbc90d6b0248792badfc649e7d98439a56feab"},"chapter":"Digital Labor","content":"In 2007, e-commerce types were agog at the success of American teenager Ashley Qualls. By the time she was seventeen, Qualls was making over \\$1 million per year from Whateverlife.com, the busy pink website she designed to market MySpace page layouts. Market is not quite the right word, though. Her layouts and addon weren’t for sale. They were free. Her income came from advertising. Because Whateverlife.com gets more than 60 million hits per month, exceeding the circulation of several of the most popular English-language teen magazines combined, it supplies advertisers with a valuable commodity: the eyeballs of teenage girls. Qualls, or AshBo as she calls herself, started Whateverlife.com in 2004. By 2007, she had expanded her site into a sort of community for girls, a go-to site where girls could find tutorials for making their own layouts as well as a variety of images, banners, captions, buttons, and boxes for decorating their MySpace pages. In addition to the revenuegenerating ads, Whateverlife.com (with its growing staf of writers and designers) features a magazine and a link to AshBo’s blog on her MySpace page.\n\nAlthough Qualls’s popularity is exceptional, her profile fits the dominant one for U.S. bloggers: she is under thirty and female.<sup>1</sup> The Pew Internet and American Life Project report on Teens and Social Media provides some context: only 8% of adult Internet users in the United States have created a blog, but 28% of online teens blog, and these are most likely to be girls. Describing her site as “a place to express yourself,” Qualls repeats the reason most U.S. bloggers give for blogging: a wish to express herself creatively.<sup>2</sup> By 2007, she was earning enough from Whateverlife.com to drop out of high school and purchase a house. 3\n\nAshley Qualls provides an image of blogging as a popular technological practice of content production, media use, and multiple platform integration inscribed into everyday life such that there is little diference between being on- or ofline. Together with the statistical snapshots provided by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, this image might create the sense that we are accessing a truth about blogs and social networks: they are by and for teenage girls. Both blogs and social networks produce afective spaces where girls express themselves, share their feelings, and reach out with a little hope that someone will be touched and reach back. Accessed through the intense emotional world of networked adolescence, blogs aren’t confined to a sphere separate from other media. They are situated in a rich communicative habitat consisting of multiple platforms and applications (mobile phones, social network sites, video, music, and photo-sharing sites). Blogs seem then to be ways that any of us could report on, share, experience, and even market our social lives. With a little luck, we could even earn revenue on ads accompanying each and every heartfelt expression. Feelings can be profitable.\n\n1","previous_page":null,"next_page":2}