Neff's Entrepreneurial Labor

Models and new media workers really are the same people. Neff, et al depict a great way to advance an academic career: pick two interesting, but seemingly unrelated subjects, then compare and contrast.

Again, as with Neff's last article, I'm forced to wonder if more is going on than meets the eye. Neff traces two rhetorics for employment and says they are the same. But are all new media entrepreneurial jobs like this?

Another thing that bothered me about this article was that the modeling occupation can become enveloped by new media content producers. They overlap in many ways, because although models aren't coders, they can provide the cultural content that these coders are developing. Neff also doesn't limit her analysis to new media workers as programmers, so it would be easy to see how models could belong to both industries simultaneously. I guess this isn't really so much of a problem, but I would have liked to see this angle built on.

Finally, how about comparing academics to these two occupations. We can see some overlap in the work between models, new media entrepreneurial labor, and academics. For instance, academics need to constantly keep reading and honing their skills in much the same way that programmers need to continue to learn new skills. The compulsory networking that Neff talks about is also vital for academic work. So in my mind, there is now another question that needs to be answered. How far do the categories that Neff draws about models and new media workers extend throughout the postindustrial workforce? For instance, is there glamour to be seen in working in the electronics department in Wal-Mart?