Cultural workers’ performance of expertise on social media

Karen Patel

Birmingham City University

“While some professionals defined their backgrounds as providing invaluable arts expertise, many of the public participants questioned the knowledge of the professionals, referring to them as self-appointed experts. This was supported by the fact that many of the ‘experts’ interviewed, acknowledged that they knew little about arts practice outside their specialism”

Jancovic (2015:7)

Signalling expertise

Candace Jones (2002) Signaling Expertise: How Signals Shape Careers in the Creative Industries

• Institutional context – institutional and economic context of signals –formal and informal structures and enforcement mechanisms

• Signalling content –• identity (aesthetic style)• performance (exhibiting requisite skills)• relationships (career relevant networks)

• Signalling strategies –• status enhancement (amplifying your signal to be heard above competitors)• reputation building (type and pattern of relations pursued) • impression management (strategically amplifying, reducing or deflecting

signals)

“Expertise is therefore a social relation where a particular actor has authority over another actor through their possession of a particular form of knowledge: the way a doctor has authority over the patient for example. Possession of this knowledge results from the expert’s situation in a particular epistemic community and his or her enculturation with that community’s ‘knowledge culture’”

Prince (2010:6)

Rules of Art (1996) Illusio“Collective belief in the game” (p.230)

Who Created the Creators? (1993) “What is called ‘creation’ is the encounter between a socially constituted habitus and a particular position that is already instituted or possible in the division of labour cultural production” (p.98)

Bourdieu

Performance of expertise on social media

• Association through platform specific functions - #, @, likes

• Potential for public endorsement by people/institutions

• Networking

Power of the platform

• Temporal• Structural• Ownership

“We argue that algorithms are always/already ideological (Mager, 2012), in the way of all mediating technology (Postman, 1992) because they operate for particular interests (such as Facebook’s capital expansion) and have been developed through different histories of power.”

(Skeggs and Yuill, 2015:12)

Summary

• Expertise as socially constituted also applies to expertise performances on social media, but through the affordances of social media platforms

• Part of the illusio in a new guise online?

• Expertise performances are mediated through platforms and the corporations behind them

Thank youkaren.patel@bcu.ac.uk

http://karenpatelresearch.wordpress.com

@KarenPatel