{"id":18951,"date":"2014-07-24T09:00:47","date_gmt":"2014-07-24T13:00:47","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=18951"},"modified":"2014-07-23T16:30:59","modified_gmt":"2014-07-23T20:30:59","slug":"what-the-epas-kardashian-tweet-says-about-affective-labor","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2014\/07\/24\/what-the-epas-kardashian-tweet-says-about-affective-labor\/","title":{"rendered":"What the EPA’s Kardashian Tweet Says About Affective Labor"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image credit<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Late Monday night it was discovered that one of the EPA\u2019s Twitter accounts<\/a> was a C-list celebrity on the popular iPhone game Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.\u00a0<\/i>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\u2019t 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?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t think they\u2019re worth hanging around. Maybe if Climate Change came out with an iPhone app we\u2019d pay more attention to it. <\/i>[prompted laughter<\/a>] 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\u2019s no shortage of value judgements on any of these things.<\/p>\n

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\u2019t like the accumulation of wealth but I\u2019d 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\u2019s tweet showed how sexism, economics, and everyday identity performance are deeply interwoven. \u00a0I 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\u2019m calling myself out and recognizing the sorts of default behaviors that I\u2019ve been taught to uphold as a straight white guy.<\/p>\n

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The tweet was eventually taken down the next day after accumulating several thousand retweets.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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 \u201clooks like that intern got fired<\/i>\u201d 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<\/a> last month, public relations is one of those professions that are both dominated by women and disparaged as not real work: \u201cCommunication and multitasking, of course, are precisely the \u2018soft skills\u2019 of emotional labor that define the post-Fordist work environment, especially within majority-women professions.\u201d<\/p>\n

The EPA (perhaps unfortunately?) does not have the kind of sophisticated and irreverent communications strategy that keeps us \u201cengaged\u201d with Taco Bell or Hot Pockets. The EPA Water twitter account is usually pretty busy convincing the public that they\u2019re not looking to \u201cregulate puddles<\/a>.\u201d 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\u2019s observation that \u201cIn PR, a certain overlap of professional and personal relationships is not only likely, but ideal\u201d and say that many people assume the ideal and project the personal (iPhone games) onto the professional (environmental protection).<\/p>\n

Discovering evidence of someone playing an iPhone game immediately opens up the opportunity to impose our own game-playing habits on someone we\u2019ve never met. We play games on our phones when we\u2019re bored. A lot of that boredom is experienced at work, either because the work is tedious or because your entire job description is bullshit<\/a>. 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 <\/i>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\u2019re doubly angry. You don\u2019t want to pay them to work, let alone play!<\/p>\n

The pi\u00e8ce de r\u00e9sistance 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 \u201cabove it all\u201d. The person\/brand\/idea that is Kim Kardashian is the epitome of the right\u2019s idea of unearned riches. To (literally!) play her game is to enact the seemingly vacuous life of fame for fame\u2019s sake. It\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

David is on\u00a0Twitter<\/a>\u00a0&\u00a0Tumblr<\/a>.<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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