Personal Branding
I’ve had this idea I’ve been working at from different angles for a few weeks; an idea that feels like the germ of the idea that’s at the heart of my dissertation’s final chapter. In Chapter 1, I argue that the discipline of composition has a really difficult time talking explicitly about economic issues, and that teaching writing with computers is one of the big places in composition that makes economic inequality really, really visible. So I go through chapters on class and economics, and come back to the economics of computers and composition at the end, where I talk about how open source perspectives can help to de-fang the effects of economic commodification in the writing classroom. But I haven’t been able to connect those issues all that well to class, until lately, especially with some prodding from a colleague over dinner tonight.
At Wealth Bondage, CEO Candidia Cruikshanks rages that The Happy Tutor is trying to steal her “brand equity” — said equity, of course, embodied in all that attitude and oh my those boots. Naomi Klein recently argued elsewhere (can’t find the link now — help me out?) that personal identity is itself an act of branding. And I’ve argued that class is the point of articulation between economics and identity. What I’ve neglected to investigate, in my considerations of the (economic?) use value of personal writing, are the ways in which identity/self/persona in and of itself, as enacted in writing, takes on both commodified and non-commodified (market and non-market; monetized and non-monetized) economic value. At Wealth Bondage — perhaps as nowhere else — we see personae qua personae ventured, offered, exchanged, and rejected in market, feudal, slave, and gift transactions. So — rhetoricians, compositionists, bloggers — what are the values of the personal selves you compose and enact on your weblogs? Some of those values are easily commodified: technorati, blogshares, comments; promotion, hiring, tenure. So, too, for students: my professor tells me this weblog entry is worth a C minus. But what about those other types of economic transactions; the non-commodified ones?
And how might those non-commodified values shift when we move from considering the various blog personae of teachers to considering the various blog personae of students?
May 8th, 2005 at 7:47 pm
I much appreciate your “point of articulation between economics and identity.”
Though too obliquely, over a year ago I hinted at it breifly in Unto This Last.
You’ll maybe find my links there helpful.
May 9th, 2005 at 6:57 pm
Thanks, Styles. I’m likely being dense, but your hints are somewhat too oblique for me, I’m afraid — though the style quiz to which you link has interesting class connotations. The Happy Tutor, of course, understands that in many ways, the style is the man — and the project he and others are engaged in at Wealth Bondage has recently taken a fascinating turn in privileging style itself over the identity attached to a name.
Interesting Ruskin reference, though.
This little book belonged to Elinor Klink, my great-great-grandmother, in 1909.
May 10th, 2005 at 5:04 pm
Ruskin’s work is my principal reference. It’s worth a look as you conclude your study — as even your great-great-grandmother might possibly agree.