Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Lit Review and Annotated Bib
Lit Review and Annotated Bib
Camila Alvarez
Meeghan Faulconer
ENC 1102
20 October 2019
Instagram launched in October 2010 and has steadily been growing since then (Mosseri).
It is a picture-based platform where people can post and share pictures, videos, stories,
boomerangs, gifs, and the like on their accounts for free. Additionally, people can send direct
messages to chat with others on the application. In recent years, Instagram has become a
platform for markets and brands as well. Through the application, businesses have taken the
liberty to advertise their shops and products to a wider audience. Among those businesses is the
art market. Instagram has made direct content creator and audience communication accessible
Instagram has created a business account that many artists use nowadays to help build an
audience and gain customers by allowing the artists to regulate their market analytics, product
sales, and performance statistics (Mosseri). However, with the growth of accessibility through
social media, competition among the art community has increased along with the expectation of
the artist’s availability. A survey conducted by MTV of music listeners between the ages 19-25
showed that artists are expected to constantly be available, especially on social media (Baym 14).
This communication among artists and their audience, whether they are aware of it or not, has
formed a genre of rhetoric. Scott Consigny claims rhetoric should involve “receptivity”—the
ability to respond to the conditions and demands of individual situations (Grant 265). This is
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essentially what artists are doing through their social media accounts by reacting and responding
to the feedback their audiences give them. Because of the popularity this relatively new
movement of marketing art through social media has, research has been conducted to understand
Amalia Foka, in her research of ranking artists through social media mining, collected
data of artists on Twitter by treating them as brands. What she found was that while markets can
strategize techniques through stock market behavior, that is not applicable to the art market
because art as a product has no set value and its price is affected by the artist’s appreciation and
recognition by the art community (Foka 415). Rather than advertising their products like any
other business would, artists have to gain appreciation and loyalty of their followers and they do
this mainly by relational labor (Baym 16). Relational labor is “regular, ongoing communication
with audiences over time to build social relationships that foster paid work” (Baym 16). Artists
are not paid to connect with their fans, but it is seen as an investment. By building relationships
with their audience, artists can use their loyalty for monetization.
The communication presented through social media networks in general, not just with
artists, uses rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and logos when engaging in a discourse
profession, and nowadays an artist’s communication is natively digital (Carradini 136). The
advantage of using social media as a platform for interaction comes from its expressive
potentiality of discourse through the usage of writing, multimedia, fixed image, video, etc.
(Berlanga 131). Wei-Lung Chang conducted a study comparing four Twitter users, two
politicians and two celebrities, to see how much sentiment ratio affected the influence they had
on social media (1138). What they found was that sentiment analysis can objectively adjust the
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quality of a post generating more social influence (Chang 1150). In other words, the quality of
the post relies more on the sentiment behind it than the topic itself to have a larger impact on the
reader. With this concept, by building an emotional relationship with their audience, artists can
Instagram has enabled artists to build a supporting community among them through its
easy accessibility of engaging with an audience. This movement has begun a new form of
marketing art with novel strategies in place. The artist’s relationship with their audience is a key
communication artists use on social media to connect with their followers. However, while there
has been a considerable amount of research done of artists’ presence on social media and their
relationship with their audience, there has been limited research focusing on the rhetorical
Annotated Bibliography
Baym, Nancy K. “Connect with Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection.” The
Nancy Baym writes in this article how part of an artist’s job is maintaining ongoing
interactions. This ongoing communication between artists and their audience is referred to as
relational labor and has become almost expected of artists on social media platforms. In
fostering their relationship with their audiences, artists should balance their own competing
economic and social needs with their audiences’ needs to connect with them and each other.
Sustaining a relationship with their audiences is not compensated, but rather expected from
artists. It is seen as an investment towards building an audience that will sustain a career.
This article therefore studies the “media labor” produced from artists on social media in an
effort to understand the social movement it is shaping as a result. This article highlights how
social media has impacted the relationship between artists and their audiences and how
maintaining that interaction has become a larger part of their labor than it has ever been. I can
use the research done in this paper to defend my claim that an artist’s communication with
Berlanga, I. et al. “Ethos, Pathos and Logos in Facebook. User Networking: «Rhetor» of the 21st
Berlagna writes in this article about the lack of research done on the classical origins of
observe the communicative processes on the internet (mainly social media platforms). They
focus on the usage of persuasive language (ethos, pathos, logos) and rhetorical devices. The
ability to be extremely expressive on social media have managed to unleash creativity and
persuasiveness. Focusing on the presence of rhetoric on Facebook they found that the users
Greco-Roman antiquity. The study of three typified cases and content analysis of discourse
occurring from the rise of online networks. They believe implementing more deep, critical
thinking would benefit the communication between people online. This article proved my
belief that rhetorical devices are being used on social media. Gathering this information, I
plan on connecting it to the genre of communication artists use —mainly focusing on ethos
and pathos.
Blumenfeld, Zach. “Selling the Artists, Not the Art: Using Personal Brand Concepts to Reform
Copyright Law for the Social Media Age.” Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts, 2019, pp.
Zach Blumenfeld addresses in his article the issue that has arisen for artists with the
expansion of social media usage. Artists’ work is being replicated and spread without giving
credit to the creator whether in the shape of memes or merchandise. It has become a norm
within the culture that artists are no longer upset at the lack of credit, rather they refuse to
have their artwork be associated or altered with something they do not represent (hate
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groups, political parties, etc.). Blumenfeld speaks about the different laws in place, which
ones work and which do not, and how social media acts according to the laws placed to
protect artists. This research has helped me gain a deeper understanding of how social media
has impacted the arts and in what ways the laws and regulations among the art community
have had to adapt (and are still adapting) to protect the artists.
State University, USA, Sage, 2019, Vol. 82(2), pp. 133-52, DOI: 136897868. Accessed 6
October 2019.
This article’s main focus is on incorporating the arts into business and professional
communication scholars to increase workplace communication. The paper fills the gaps
about how artists include business and professional communication in their careers. By
addressing arts situations – such as crafting email pitches to producers, taking promotional
photography, creating crowdfunding promotions, and the like – students can learn about
communication genres into the assignments and work. While this paper is focused on
business communication and improving it, the author listed some interesting and helpful
points when speaking about how artists communication defers from any other form of
in an artist’s profession.
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Media.” Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, part of Spring Nature 2018, 13 February
This article’s goal was to devise a model of social media that can measure and analysis
sentiment and help discover real influential people on social media. The study takes into
consideration not only the ratio of sentiment behind a post but the quality of it as well. They
discovered the meaning of sentiment behind a post, retweet, or reply is more meaningful than
the numbers. For the research, four targets were selected (two politicians and two celebrities)
on Twitter to examine with the model mentioned before. The results showed sentiment ratio
was higher for celebrities than politicians and that various topics have different impacts on
the audience. This article helped defend my initial belief that pathos (emotional appeal) plays
a large role in how artists maintain ongoing interaction and relationships with their followers.
This study showed me that people are equally, if not more, interested in feeling an emotional
connection with the person posting on social media allowing them to have a larger influence
on certain platforms.
Cossu, Alberto. “Beyond Social Media Determinism? How Artists Reshape the Organization of
The author talks about how artists and creative workers are and have been engaging in
social movements. The social movements range from experimenting with alternative
economic models and currencies to partnering with institutional and social actors to
supporting neighborhoods and carrying out social research and radical education. Not to
mention, artists continue to produce art even when the budget for art culture is being
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decreased in numerous countries across the world. The article’s goal is to investigate the
the organization in modern artistic social movements. The findings in this study has shown
me the persistence among the art community. Faced with challenge after challenge, art
continues to thrive between the cracks in a system not aimed for their success. Social media
is another movement artists have gotten behind and are learning to dominate.
Foka, Amalia F. “An Artist Ranking System Based on Social Media Mining.” Springer Science
+ Business Media, LLC, part of Spring Nature 2018, 5 February 2018, pp. 411-40, DOI:
This article’s research is focused on social media mining to extract quantitative and
qualitative data for the art market. For the study artists are treated as brands. The researchers
mine specific Twitter posts that mention certain artists and rank artists as brand equity and
awareness would be measured. User expertise and influence, considered mainly in the
construction of a topic-specific network, is evaluated and later used to rank artists. The
intended ranking system is also evaluated against two other systems. Foka’s research has
shown me that the art market cannot be directly studied as other brands, since an artwork’s
value has no objective value. Art is subjective, and artists have to find a way to monetize and
Grant-Davie, Keith. “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.” Wardle and Downs, pp. 347-
63. Originally published in Rhetoric Review, vol. 15, no. 2, 1997, pp. 264-79. Accessed 11
October 2019.
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In “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents,” Keith Grant-Davie discusses the steps
involved in analyzing rhetorical situations to get a better idea as to why they happen.
sees a need to change reality and it can be done with rhetoric discourse. A rhetor brings
awareness to an issue within a community of people with discourse to resolve the issue(s).
Grant-Davie dives into each different rhetorical situation and the strategies involved for a
given outcome. For example, rhetorical exigence can be analyzed through a series of natural
steps for interrogating a subject while when working with written or oral communication of a
discourse a rhetor must work within the constraints of the situation. This article helped me
gain a clearer understanding of a rhetorical situation and how to imply that to the rhetoric
October 2019.
Instagram was launched back in October of 2010, and they created a website to share
important information through. They publicly published their terms and conditions, privacy
policies, along with information about their co-founders and overseers. An array of articles
are written and published every few weeks updating the readers about any news happening
on Instagram. They even included a timeline since they began, outlining the major updates
and changes they have undergone each year. I used this source mainly as a reference to
Instagram’s main objective and the possible features available with the application, such as