UCLA UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Postfeminist Technologies: Digital Media and the Culture Industries of Choice Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3tg184z1 Author Cohn, Jonathan Publication Date 2013 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Los Angeles Postfeminist Technologies: Digital Media and the Culture Industries of Choice A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in Film and Television by Jonathan Alan Cohn 2013 © Copyright by Jonathan Alan Cohn 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Postfeminist Technologies: Digital Media and the Culture Industries of Choice by Jonathan Alan Cohn Doctor in Philosophy in Film and Television University of California, Los Angeles, 2013 Professor Kathleen McHugh, Chair In this dissertation, I argue that digital recommendation systems – a relatively recent technological innovation – fundamentally reconfigure the very notion of “self” in and for the digital era. Many popular websites, including Google, Netflix and Amazon, employ these systems to assist the user in making decisions of all types, by offering recommendations based on particular algorithms. Throughout the dissertation, I engage the ways that these recommendation systems facilitate contemporary notions of agency and identity as they are constructed through acts of choice. I examine how these systems have enabled the emergence of what I call the culture industries of choice. These industries use digital recommendation systems to lead users toward certain decisions and objects and away from others. In doing so, these automated recommendations, derived from an analysis of user data, shape the contemporary self ii through a rhetoric that equates conformity with equality and consumerism with freedom. Now a part of today’s most popular and influential websites and digital technologies, these digital recommendation systems articulate self-representation and modulation as an integral part of electronic consumption; further, they articulate new networks and conceptions of community. Thus, the need to understand how they affect the way we represent ourselves and think ourselves, as well as how we construct our local and global communities, grows increasingly urgent. By focusing on how recommendation systems are used by a wide range of sites and technologies, I suggest that the notion of the “recommendation” may serve as a means of critically examining the intertwined relationship between postfeminism, neoliberalism, and digital culture. While many theorists have written extensively about the pervasiveness of choice and the anxieties that result from the need to choose in a neoliberal and postfeminist context, my project shifts the frame by exploring how digital recommendation systems have developed to help people manage and make these choices. My dissertation focuses on how discourse and technology have interacted from the birth of the World Wide Web (W3) in 1992 to the present and how digital technologies and algorithms are presented as lifting the “burden” of choice, a sense of burden upon which neoliberal and postfeminist discourses depend, and in so doing offer greater “freedom.” These technologies both figuratively and literally shape user profiles through this instrumentalization of choice. I begin in Chapter One with a discussion of digital recommendation systems in relation to the postfeminist, neoliberal workplace and the female professional. Many of these technologies were developed by Professor Pattie Maes in the early 1990’s at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology specifically to help female professionals manage the many difficult everyday iii choices that having a family and a career often entails. Maes’s recommendation systems organized schedules, sorted email, searched for music and other media, and helped academics find others with similar interests. In Chapter Two, I focus on how postfeminist discourses centered around citizenship, gender, and sexuality are at play on media recommendation sites like Netflix and Digg.com and in relation to Digital Video Recorders like TiVo. Chapter Three explores how these same discourses and a strong focus on postfeminist self-management affect personal relationships through recommendations on dating websites that use matchmaking software, with a special focus on eHarmony. Chapter Four examines how neoliberal and postfeminist paradigms of choice, individuality, and traditional gender norms are transforming the human body through websites and technologies that analyze, judge, and rate a person’s appearance in order to recommend “make-overs” including plastic surgery operations. Throughout, I show how these recommendation technologies and their varied uses transform and complicate our relationship to our very senses of “self” in our current media landscape. iv The dissertation of Jonathan Alan Cohn is approved. Steve Mamber John Caldwell Lisa Cartwright Kathleen McHugh, Committee Chair University of California, Los Angeles 2013 v For my parents, Simon and Janet Cohn vi Table of Contents Introduction 1 Data Fields of Dreams Chapter 1 41 Female Labor and Digital Media: Pattie Maes and the Birth of Recommendation Systems and Social Networking Technologies Chapter 2 86 TiVo, Netflix and Digg: Digital Media Distribution and the Myth of the Empowered Consumer Chapter 3 153 Commodifying Love: eHarmony’s Matchmaking System and the Quantification of Personality Chapter 4 206 The Mirror Phased: Digital Imaging Technologies, Beautification Engines, and the Technological Gaze Conclusion 262 On Handling Toddlers and Structuring the Limits of Knowledge Bibliography 268 vii Acknowledgements Many people offered me support and guidance during the process of writing this dissertation. For their many contributions to my thinking about digital recommendation systems, I would like to thank Rebecca Baron, Janet Bergstrom, Lauren Berliner, Heather Collette-Vanderaa, Manohla Dargis, Allyson Field, Dawn Fratini, Jason Gendler, Harrison Gish, Doug Goodwin, Deanna Gross, N. Katherine Hayles, Erin Hill, Pattie Maes, Maja Manojlovic, Jennifer Moorman, Chon Noriega, David O’Grady, Jennifer Porst, Todd Pressner, Hilary Radner, Rita Raley, Steve Ricci, Maya Smukler, Vivian Sobchack, and Tess Takahashi. Jaimie Baron supported me through every stage of this work and her editing help has been invaluable. I would also like to give special thanks to my dissertation committee members, John Caldwell, Lisa Cartwright and Steve Mamber, each of whom dedicated a great deal of time and energy to giving me exceptionally helpful feedback and making this a stronger piece of scholarship. Most of all, I want to thank my Dissertation Advisor Kathleen McHugh for her mentorship throughout my academic career and extraordinary feedback on this project. Without her support and guidance, this dissertation would not have been possible. viii VITA M.A. UCLA Cinema and Media Studies, 2007 B.A. UCLA English, Concentration in Creative Writing (Poetry), 2005 ACADEMIC APPOINTMENTS: The University of Alberta, Sessional, Department of English and Film Studies, July 2012 – present California State University, Los Angeles, Adjunct, Department of Communication Studies, January- March 2012 California State University, Fullerton, Adjunct, Department of Film Studies, August-December 2011 PUBLICATIONS: Journal Articles “Pattie Maes, Postfeminism, and the Birth of Social Networking Technologies” Camera Obscura. 28.2 (Fall 2013): 150-75. “1970s Disasters: Irwin Allen, Twentieth Century-Fox’s Marineland of the Pacific, and Disaster Films,” Spectator 32.1 (Spring 2012): 17-23. Book Chapters “All Work and No Play: AICE’s Trailer Park, The Mashup and Industrial Pedagogies,” Sampling Across the Spectrum. Ed. David Laderman and Laurel Westrup, 257-78. London: Oxford University Press (forthcoming, 2013). “A Bumbling Bag of Ball Bearings: Lost in Space and the Space Race,” The Galaxy is Rated G: Essays on Children’s Science Fiction Film and Television. Ed. R.C. Neighbors and Sandy Rankin, 262-78. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011. “Podcastia: Imagining Communities of Pod People,” Handbook of Research on Computer Mediated Communications. Eds. Sigrid Kelsey and Kirk St. Amant, 679-89. Hershey, PA: Idea Group, 2008. FELLOWSHIPS, GRANTS AND AWARDS Dissertation Year Fellowship, UCLA, 2012-2013 Jack K. Sauter Award for Excellence in Television Critical Writing, UCLA, 2010-2011 Army Archerd Fellowship in Theater, Film and Television, UCLA, 2009-2010 Archive Research Award, UCLA, 2009 For “Mediated Communities: Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests and Wendy Clarke’s Love Tapes” Hugh Downs Graduate Research Fellowship, UCLA, 2008-2009 Plitt Southern Theater Employees Trust Fellowship for Excellence in Cinema History Scholarship, UCLA, 2008-2009 Chancellor’s Prize Fellowship, UCLA, 2007 UCLA Best Fiction Award, Westwind Literary Journal, 2005 Undergraduate Research Scholar Program and Fellowship, 2004 ix Introduction: Data Fields of Dreams Contemporary culture involves a vast increase in the number and type of choices that people can make – regarding everything from mundane grocery selections to monumental life decisions. On the one hand, feminist and civil rights gains have opened up many education and career opportunities and life choices for women and minorities. On the other, global trade and the Internet have helped radically expand both the consumer marketplace and the amount of information to