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Influencers, Microcelebrities, and Fame Aspirants: Producing and Consuming Identity in the Social Media Age

Sat, May 27, 11:00 to 12:15, Hilton San Diego Bayfront, Floor: 3, Aqua 310AB

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Despite considerable interest in the production of identities in digital media contexts, the role of emergent subjectivities in sustaining the commodity circuit remains comparatively under-theorized. Indeed, digital tastemakers, social media influencers, and micro-celebrities participate in a global cultural economy that hypes the principles of authenticity, individualism, and aspirationalism—the very same ideals that encourage expressions of selfhood within the consumer marketplace. Against this backdrop, the scholars on this panel explore the recursive nature of cultural production and consumption in the context of digital celebrity culture.

The panelists—who span anthropology, communication/media studies, sociology, and STS—examine various online spaces where labor and leisure bleed together. First, offering insight into the astonishingly popular sub-genre of celebrity video games, Shira Chess argues that role-playing games like "Kim Kardashian: Hollywood" compel players to emulate the status-enhancing work of mainstream celebrities; at the same time, these players provide value-generating labor through their promotion of branded commodities. The contemporary emphasis on reputation-building helps to situate Elizabeth Wissinger’s analysis of media narratives about new career exemplars--bloggers, vloggers, and Instagrammers. She contends that their always-on, omni-professional workstyle is concealed by the fetishization of a worker-subject tasked with selling an image of glamour. This deft negotiation of the online self-brand frames Alice Marwick’s research into the micro-celebrity practices of social media stars. Challenging a singular conception of “authenticity,” Marwick shows how markers of authenticity are differentially constructed across platforms as participants internalize carefully prescribed norms of self-presentation. Brent Luvaas’s study of style influencers in Indonesia sheds additional light on the contested nature of fame and visibility: Luvaas contends that Indonesian style bloggers, despite blogging in English and gaining massive followings at home, remain stuck in the Southeast Asian “blogipelago” (Dean 2010), unable to extend their influence beyond a limited, regional sphere. Finally, Brooke Erin Duffy and Jeff Pooley offer a broad framework through which to understand the laboring practices of influencers, self-promoters, and celebrity aspirants. Invoking Leo Lowenthal’s (1944) framework of “mass idols,” they show how contemporary valorizations of social media celebrities herald a new form of hero-worship: the triumph of “Idols of Promotion.”

Together, the panelists map out new directions for studies of celebrity and influence that take into account the reconfiguration of technology, economics, and culture. The trends they highlight, moreover, index larger complexities of the neoliberal worker-subject at a moment when all of us--including academics--are compelled to produce eminently consumable self-brands.

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