Fiona Graham
One of the most defining features of the twenty-first century has been the rapid expansion of social media technology. With the ever-increasing hours that we spend scrolling through social media feeds on sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook, it is no wonder that our social positions are being increasingly defined by the image that we cultivate through social media platforms. There are arguments to be made both that this is a good and a bad thing. On one hand, people’s ability to deliberately shape their image seems to produce a culture of mistrust and inauthenticity. But on the other hand, the ability to cultivate a persona online can be a profitable skill, and the relative accessibility of social media across all groups and classes means that people who are disadvantaged suddenly have access to new opportunities to build successful careers for themselves.
Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy by Forrest Stuart delves deeply into the world of Chicago drillers, disadvantaged youth and young adults who have turned to creating music to support themselves in their world of poverty and violence. For these individuals, social media has presented them with an unprecedented opportunity to commodify their disadvantaged lifestyle by cultivating an exaggerated persona reflective of stereotypes of violence and crime, in order to attract audiences to their music. Drillers are able to do this by manipulating the affordances that are specific to social media, namely the fact that it is a democratized platform in which every individual has an equal opportunity to post content and attract attention.
While the democratization of social media has been important for the development of drill music’s success, Stuart makes a point to highlight that disadvantages that exist in the real
world affects the social media world as well. An important theme throughout the book is digital disadvantage, which is defined as “the qualitative differences in the uses and consequences of technology” (8). As Stuart develops his argument over the course of the book, he demonstrates the many ways in which the disadvantageous social position of drillers requires them to use social media in a way that is different from how the average person uses it.
A driller is much more in-tune with the inner workings of a social media platform than its typical user. Their income relies on capitalizing on the attention economy to the best of their ability. This means that they are constantly striving towards increasing viewership and engagement in the content that they post online, a task that requires a great deal of skill and knowledge about how social media, and specifically the algorithms that decide which content is viewed by which consumers, functions. By providing accounts of the specific thought processes and strategies that the drillers engage in, Stuart is able to present drillers not just as marginalized individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds, but as intelligent and calculating entrepreneurs with real skill.
Perhaps one of the most important themes that this book deals with is authenticity on social media. Drillers enact an important balance in their performance of authenticity in order to maximize engagement with their content. Drillers understand that in order to gain popularity, they must be seen as authentic. Followers want to know that the violence that drillers sing about and boast about on social media is actually reflective of the lived experience of that driller. In most instances, achieving this requires a deliberate cultivation of a persona that exaggerates the violence and crime that the driller is involved in, because most drillers do not experience nearly the amount of violence that they claim to. In other words, drillers practice what Stuart calls “creating authenticity”, a seemingly paradoxical process of creating and maintaining a particular
image that is supposed to appear natural and authentic through extensive effort, planning, and manipulation. For example, drillers collect large amounts of content on the rare occasion that they are participating in violence and crime which is then spread out and posted over an extended period of time to create the illusion that these photos and videos reflect the everyday experience of that individual.
Drillers are skilled performers, as most of their followers believe that the personas they have created are authentic. Stuart demonstrates this by showing how other people, specifically wealthier white individuals, perceive the drillers. He tells the story of a driller named Junior who is invited to California to spend time with Chad, a wealthy white man who has become obsessed with the driller lifestyle and is intent on replicating his perception of it. Interactions between Chad, Junior, and Stuart on this trip demonstrate just how successfully driller’s have maintained their desired image, as Chad is oblivious to the depth of the struggles that Junior faces everyday.
Stuart’s book is well-written and highly informative. It is particularly effective in demonstrating all sides of the driller’s reality and lived experience. Because Stuart spent such extensive time with the drillers and developed such close relationships with many of them, he was able to get an insider look into not just their online persona, but also their lived experience and the performances that they enact around close friends and family. The contradictions between these two performances is important, and suggests that Stuart was able to achieve a very detailed, complete, and in-depth picture of the reality of life as a driller.
That being said, as Stuart is constantly emphasizing the performative nature of living as a driller, in which giving performances that are seen as authentic is crucial for survival, readers might wonder whether Staurt was given a particular performance as well. No matter how much time he spent with the drillers and no matter how close he felt he was to them, he still came from
an entirely alien world to them as a professor at a prestigious institution. Considering the driller’s expertise in performance, we might be wary that drillers were at times giving inauthentic performances around Stuart as well.
While Stuart was extremely successful in his project of telling a detailed story of drillers in Chicago, he was less successful in addressing the wider problem of the impacts of digital disadvantage. This is because the example of drillers is such an extreme one. Most people who experience digital disadvantage, namely marginalized individuals who come from disadvantaged social standings, cannot relate to the experiences of drillers. While they likely put on a performance on social media, this performance is far less strategically cultivated, because it has far less wide reaching consequences. Stuart’s book fails to capture how digital disadvantage is experienced for individuals whose relationship to social media is separate from their main source of income, an area that deserves attention, as it is reflective of the experiences of a majority of marginalized and disadvantaged people.
Nevertheless, Ballad of the Bullet: Gangs, Drill Music, and the Power of Online Infamy is an extremely detailed and informative book which gives important insight into the ways in which social media can be manipulated by people to serve their needs. It presents an insightful discussion on the results of the democratization of social media for marginalized and disadvantaged individuals, and how digital disadvantage must still be accounted for despite the seemingly equal footing that social media gives to its users. Any young person entrenched in the culture of social media would benefit from reading this book, especially those who might never have had a reason to consider the ways that disadvantage can be manifested in a digital sphere.