Late Monday night it was discovered that one of the EPA’s Twitter accounts was a C-list celebrity on the popular iPhone game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood. The Tweet was one of those automatically generated ones meant to announce progress in a game or the unlocking of an achievement. Its easy to imagine the scenario: an over-worked or deeply bored social media manager didn’t realize they were signed into their work account instead of their personal one and let the tweet go. Or maybe a family member borrowed their work phone. Who knows? What we do know is that the tweet immediately garnered thousands of retweets and countless more screenshots were shared on other platforms. Why is this even remotely funny? What sorts of publicly held believes does it reveal?
On the face of it, the tweet is funny in a late night show monologue sort of way: a recent event upon which dozens of jokes can be made about ineffectual government agencies, social media habits, and celebrities. Republicans have defanged the Environmental Protection Agency so much even Kim Kardashian doesn’t think they’re worth hanging around. Maybe if Climate Change came out with an iPhone app we’d pay more attention to it. [prompted laughter] Something terrible and lazy like that. But these sorts of jokes only work if there are some widely held value judgements about their ingredients. And, as we all know, there’s no shortage of value judgements on any of these things.
Powerful women like Kim Kardashian are often maligned as stupid or shallow despite their tremendous talents as savvy business owners and public figures (I don’t like the accumulation of wealth but I’d never say the people that manage to do it are necessarily stupid); social media is often disregarded as mere self-centered posturing; and environmental protection always walks the line between obnoxious tree hugging liberalism and nefarious economic sabotage. The reactions to the EPA’s tweet showed how sexism, economics, and everyday identity performance are deeply interwoven. I should note that I was one of the people who retweeted. I even posted a screenshot to Facebook, so when I say that the reactions to the EPA tweet are deeply conservative, I’m calling myself out and recognizing the sorts of default behaviors that I’ve been taught to uphold as a straight white guy.
No specific tweet stands out as the ultimate example of conservativism and that is precisely why and how these conservative ideas are able to evade critique and rebuttal. But with each “looks like that intern got fired” it gets a little bit easier to apply unrealistic expectations to public relations teams . Its also worth mentioning that these jobs are actually not something that just gets tossed to interns, managing a social media brand is real work. And, as Jennifer Pan wrote last month, public relations is one of those professions that are both dominated by women and disparaged as not real work: “Communication and multitasking, of course, are precisely the ‘soft skills’ of emotional labor that define the post-Fordist work environment, especially within majority-women professions.”
The EPA (perhaps unfortunately?) does not have the kind of sophisticated and irreverent communications strategy that keeps us “engaged” with Taco Bell or Hot Pockets. The EPA Water twitter account is usually pretty busy convincing the public that they’re not looking to “regulate puddles.” So when evidence arises that someone at the EPA is playing a game on their phone (like so many office workers do) it looks like a slip of the mask. It comes off as an accident that reveals something true about a government agency that is regarded as superfluous if not a harmful waste to a too-large percentage of the country. We can reverse Pan’s observation that “In PR, a certain overlap of professional and personal relationships is not only likely, but ideal” and say that many people assume the ideal and project the personal (iPhone games) onto the professional (environmental protection).
Discovering evidence of someone playing an iPhone game immediately opens up the opportunity to impose our own game-playing habits on someone we’ve never met. We play games on our phones when we’re bored. A lot of that boredom is experienced at work, either because the work is tedious or because your entire job description is bullshit. Maybe both. Of course it is a uniquely American sentiment that working for the government is subject to very different expectations. Government workers should be super-efficient as their paychecks come from our involuntarily paid tax dollars rather than our voluntarily paid (tell that to the uninsured hospital patient) private market exchanges. While it might be okay for me to play Dots at my desk, the EPA worker should always be perfectly efficient. If you think the entire mission of the EPA is detrimental to your own desires, then you’re doubly angry. You don’t want to pay them to work, let alone play!
The pièce de résistance is, of course, the name of the iPhone game. Chastising a PR person for playing a game that reifies celebrity culture is just too tempting for those seeking a way to feel “above it all”. The person/brand/idea that is Kim Kardashian is the epitome of the right’s idea of unearned riches. To (literally!) play her game is to enact the seemingly vacuous life of fame for fame’s sake. It’s a deeply ironic stance to take: Turning your nose up at both the profession and the game playing person requires an appeal to the genuine and to the authentic- things that are deeply informed by celebrities and public relations professionals.
I don’t think, by itself, laughing at the EPA Kardashian tweet is a bad thing. There is something benignly funny about the juxtaposition of these two brands meeting in a single tweet. At the same time, it does seem like something that a Fox News mouth breather would find hilarious. What is disturbing and deeply insidious however, is the latent conservativism that props up many of the seemingly banal reactions to the accident. It demeans affective labor while simultaneously reminding everyone that Kim Kardashian got rich the wrong way.
Comments 7
Alex — July 24, 2014
There's also the fact that the tweet was sent at 11 pm. Salaried workers don't get overtime, but a social media manager is expected to be working at all hours. So this government worker is putting in unpaid time monitoring their work Twitter account late at night, probably on a smartphone they pay for themselves, and people are upset that they are playing a game. During time that a generation ago would have been unquestionably their own.
Lindsay — July 24, 2014
Hi David,
Thank you for your article.
If you have a moment, can you elaborate on your use of affective labor? Are you saying that the EPA worker is performing affective labor when playing the game, or something else?
Best,
Lindsay
Lindsay — July 24, 2014
Thanks David and Alex.
Based on the article's introduction it seemed a little ambiguous to me as to whether this employee was actually on the clock or not (or even if not on the clock, checking his work social media diligently and accidentally recording game play in the process as opposed to someone borrowing his phone, or trying to use a personal account and accidentally using a work account). I absolutely agree that affective labor is going on when an employee updates social media for a place of employment. It is also interesting to consider that the particular tweet in question was automated, no?
The reason I ask about affective labor is because I'm wrestling with the idea of whether we can call it "labor" when someone's online participation (that is neither "on the clock" or "off the clock" diligence, in other words so-called leisure time) produces value, or whether another concept is better suited. Most people in the field, including Fuchs and Andrejevic, would argue yes, but from a more orthodox perspective it would not be. But perhaps this is a conversation for another time.
Anyways, many thanks again! Truly appreciate this site.
Best,
Lindsay
Alex — July 25, 2014
@Lindsay I'm not sure what is ambiguous about whether the employee was "on the clock," at 11 pm, when their 9-5 office is definitely closed, except that salaried workers don't get a "clock" to be on in the first place. They must have been logged in to the work account, or the automatic tweet wouldn't have gone out on it. A social media job like this has you essentially on call 24-7 in case something comes up. Even when you're logged into your personal social media accounts, you are expected to project an image that reflects well on your employer and builds your "personal brand" to prepare for the likelihood that you need to find a new employer some day.
US labor law for hourly workers' on-call time says that you are only working during the time you spend on work tasks, not the entire time you are on call, as long as you have enough time and freedom in between tasks to do your own activities. But the lived experience for on-call workers is one where they are never free of intrusive work demands, and always anxious about missing a call. That constant need to expect interruption and be cheerful and helpful when it arrives is affective work.
My wife is on call 24-7 every day of the year. She worries about turning her phone off in church. She was scolded by her boss for taking 10 minutes to respond to a text because she was in the doctor's office. Our sleep is interrupted by calls several times a week. Since she's hourly, she gets paid for the time dealing with the call-- so if the phone rings at 3 am and she takes 10 minutes to deal with it, she gets 1/6 of an hour's wage. That's about $3.60. Heck, if it's overtime, she might get almost five bucks! Totally worth it.
But while this is a somewhat extreme example, more and more salaried workers are expected to constantly monitor their work email. This is a classic speed-up-- increased productivity for the same pay. I have gotten irate midnight emails from supervisors angry that no-one responded to the email they sent at 10 pm.
I think sociologically one of the most interesting things about this is that it is a reversal of the process of clock discipline instituted with the industrial revolution, in which previously undifferentiated time was measured and partitioned into work and leisure. Under the modernist system, you only work at work, and personal tasks on work time are "time theft." You arrive at a set time and stay at work a set amount of time, regardless of the tasks to be done. The advantage for workers, though, is that you're free when you clock out, and your schedule is usually predictable. This sort of on-the-clock vs off-the-clock thinking and practice was utterly alien prior to the late 18th century, and still is in many parts of the world. (Here's a classic reference: https://libcom.org/files/timeworkandindustrialcapitalism.pdf )
But what we are seeing over the past 15-20 years is not a simple return to a practice in which work, entertainment, childcare, and household chores were interspersed and scheduled freely by individuals as needs arose. Instead, paid work now takes precedence and increasingly interrupts and displaces other activities. Even as new ways of monitoring workers reduces "time theft" at work, employers are stealing more and more of their workers' theoretically free time with on-call, just-in-time scheduling, and after-hours cell phone calls, texts, and email. It's a violation of the terms of the original industrial bargain.
Federal regulation and increasing the bargaining power of workers would go a long way towards combating this, but it's obviously easier said than done considering the capture of Congress and regulatory agencies by business interests. I was glad to see President Obama calling on Congress to close the loophole that allows ostensibly American corporations to move production and capital overseas, but I doubt it can get through the current Congress.
Sorry, this comment got longer than I intended; it's an interesting topic. Thanks for such a thought-provoking post, David.
Alex — July 25, 2014
See also: http://valleywag.gawker.com/if-taskrabbit-is-the-future-of-employment-the-employed-1609221541 about TaskRabbit's recent change that removes the ability of workers to schedule tasks, and penalizes those who are not available immediately and at all hours.