With Etsy joining the usual suspects of social media, everyone and their grandma is seemingly engaged in digital DIY. Etsy, Youtube and ebay advertise deliverables to ‘everyone’, but different demographics are differently attracted. The average Pinterest user is white, suburban and female with higher than average income and educational attainment (Pew, 2013). It’s not that others aren’t taking advantage of Pinterest and Etsy, but we know less about the underrepresented. Leonardi (2003) discusses cultural perceptions of US Latinos and technology, while others examine youth populations (Pascoe, 2011; Kahne, Middaugh, & Allen, 2014; Marwick & Boyd, 2014). However, many studies focus on the highly impoverished and their disadvantages when it comes to the Internet for basic needs and access. Missing are the everyday leisure practices of the working class, those who may live paycheck-to-paycheck yet are still desirous of participatory DIY culture offered through such channels mentioned above. Enter Carmen Micheals, a self-identified working class craft diva and former pageant drag queen recently taken to the Net in order to market her brand and encourage people to “reuse, recycle and upcycle”.
Carmen is unique but exemplary of those outside the target demographic who engage the DIY movement. Sedaris (2014) parodies the craft movement with her book Simple Times: Crafts for Poor People. While arguably not A-list, Sedaris is a celebrity and certainly not poor; neither are most Americans who “Pinterest”. Luckman (2013) highlights the “time poor, cash rich women… with an increased capacity to engage in discretionary spending such as on handmade items” (p. 255). While contemporary crafting might be routinely described as middle class, both Sedaris’ tongue-in-cheek humor and Luckman’s exploration point to the notion that “the working class have always been DIY” (Luckman, 2013, p. 258). Building on critical and queer scholarship in new media, this case study of Carmen Micheals theorizes the working class sector of the craft/DIY movement. In-depth interviews and observations provide qualitative insight into alternative voices in the digital DIY movement along with perspective on technological affordances and working class identity.
About the presenterCandice D. Roberts
Candice is Associate Professor of Communication and Director of the LGBTQ+ Center at St. John’s University.
They hold a PhD in Communication, Culture & Media from Drexel University and designed a transnational network ethnography of the CouchSurfing community and its function as a hybrid collective. More broadly their work examines cultural narrative and identity in popular media, and they are particularly interested in archetypes, consumer behavior, and sociality around themes of class, sexuality and space/place.