View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by ResearchArchive at Victoria University of Wellington Knitting Ourselves Into Being: the case of labour and hip domesticity on the social network Ravelry.com By Maria Hellstrom A thesis submitted to the Victoria University of Wellington in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies Victoria University of Wellington 2013 1 Table of Contents Abstract ................................................................................................................................................... 3 Chapter 1 – Introducing Ravelry ............................................................................................................. 4 Welcome to the social network, where your knitting matters ........................................................... 4 We need to talk about labour ............................................................................................................. 6 What is Ravelry? A brief description ................................................................................................... 9 History, membership and context .................................................................................................... 10 Social capital and Ravelry .................................................................................................................. 12 Ravelry’s multiplicity of purpose: labour space, social space, marketplace ..................................... 13 “My Notebook” ................................................................................................................................. 15 Labour space ................................................................................................................................. 17 Commodity space.......................................................................................................................... 17 Social space ................................................................................................................................... 18 A little background: methods for studying online environments ..................................................... 19 Understanding writing, knitting and interfacing through textual analysis ....................................... 22 Thesis structure and chapter outlines .............................................................................................. 24 Chapter 2 - Finding the work in social network: an overview of social media labour .......................... 28 Chapter overview .............................................................................................................................. 28 The new media worker ..................................................................................................................... 29 Contextualizing immaterial labour: a brief history ........................................................................... 33 A brief discussion of affect ................................................................................................................ 37 Facebook: the all-you-can-network social media buffet .................................................................. 39 The specialist social network and kinetic self-representation .......................................................... 42 Locating Ravelry ................................................................................................................................ 44 The prolific profile? ........................................................................................................................... 45 Chapter 3 – Hip domesticity and the cloak of affect ............................................................................ 50 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 50 A modern history of domesticity ...................................................................................................... 51 Affective labour explained ................................................................................................................ 54 Domesticity vs. commodity? ............................................................................................................. 56 Hip home ec: from cyberfeminist resistance to hip domesticity ...................................................... 58 2 Gender: the elephant in Ravelry’s living room ................................................................................. 61 I am what I am, not what I knit. Replicating one’s offline social reality through online taste performance ..................................................................................................................................... 63 Hang on, travelling woman: grounding taste performance and affect in a finished object ............. 65 A critique of affect and immateriality ............................................................................................... 67 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 69 Chapter 4 - Crafty commodities: buying, selling and knitting oneself into being ................................. 73 Introduction ...................................................................................................................................... 73 Recapping Ravelry’s spaces of interaction ........................................................................................ 76 What’s in your stash? Ravelry’s user-driven yarn marketplace and discourses of exclusivity ......... 79 The micro-economies of Ravelry: enmeshing handicrafts and capital ............................................. 84 The cloak of affect: Yarnies and enforced entrepreneurship ........................................................... 90 Incorporating materiality: Ravelry’s contribution to theory ............................................................ 92 Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 94 Overall conclusions ............................................................................................................................... 96 3 Abstract Knitting Ourselves Into Being: the case of labour and hip domesticity on the social network Ravelry.com Thinking of social media participation in terms of doing work may seem a strange proposition. Yet, social network and handicrafts website Ravelry.com requires a great deal of labour from its members. From painstakingly hand-knitting fuzzy objects to photographing, recording and sharing these objects online, Ravelers must supply evidence of their hard work in order to fully participate in this online community. On Ravelry, “writing oneself into being” (Sundén 2002), or performing one’s self through a textual medium, encompasses much more than simply writing. One must knit oneself into being too. Social capital is then accumulated through extensive cataloguing of handmade items. These ‘finished objects’ of knitting and crochet are imbued with affective meaning as tokens of nurturing and gift-giving, consistent with a historicity in which handicrafts like knitting have been associated with gendered care-work. Yet, much of Ravelry’s activity centres on commodity exchange. Displaying commodity ownership is as important as displaying evidence of labour for the accrual of social capital. Recording and displaying domesticity as both acts of labour and acts of consumption fit within a wider trend of hip domesticity, where demonstrating one’s domesticity has become a facet of popular culture. This project examines Ravelry.com’s emphasis on the placement of a physical object between the self and the social network. The thesis argues that this incorporation of material objects into the structure of a social network challenges notions of disembodiment and immateriality. Ravelry.com demonstrates the need for a discussion of social media participant labour which goes beyond the immaterial and affective. 4 Chapter 1 – Introducing Ravelry Welcome to the social network, where your knitting matters Traditional domestic arts such as knitting and crochet are perhaps not the associations which first spring to mind when talking about social networks and new media technologies. Yet, communities surrounding these traditional handicrafts flourish online. The fibrecrafts-oriented website Ravelry.com (“a site for knitters and crocheters”) is prominent within these communities, and within this site, and others like it, a particular social network dynamic has emerged. At a cursory glance, the Ravelry world may seem straight-forward: it is a one-stop shop for the resources required for knitting or crocheting, and additionally fulfils the expectations of social network functions so prevalent within contemporary online mediascapes. Yet, an interesting moment occurs when attempting to access Ravelry’s social network. It appears that simply identifying oneself as a knitter or crocheter (as one evidently is when signing up to such a niche site) is not in itself sufficient for gaining the social capital necessary for full entry into Ravelry as community. It is not adequate to state that one is a knitter or crocheter – one must prove it through acts of labour