Digital first personality: Automation and influence within evolving media ecologies

Abstract

This article is about the new roles within social media as a result of the software that automatically gathers and influences our usage: digital first personalities. I use cultural intermediation as a framework to locate the automated processes, such as algorithmic generated recommender systems, that influence content consumption practices driven by digital first personalities. First, the article applies cultural intermediation to celebrity, social media influencers and algorithms to highlight how media is produced and distributed by new forms of intermediation. This section outlines the new players in social media, how the value of media content is transferred from one stakeholder group to another and how algorithms increasingly place prominence on particular types of content. The article then presents fieldwork from several digital agencies that are responsible for creating the digital first personality role. These agencies are demonstrable of those that produce commercially oriented content alongside other more public affairs-oriented content. Finally, the article argues that digital first personalities are crucial actors within cultural intermediation to ensure public issues remain visible to those stakeholders who are most impacted by timely information on societal issues.

Full text

Article
Digital first personality:
Automation and influence
within evolving
media ecologies
Jonathon Hutchinson
University of Sydney, Australia
Abstract
This article is about the new roles within social media as a result of the software that automatically
gathers and influences our usage: digital first personalities. I use cultural intermediation as a
framework to locate the automated processes, such as algorithmic generated recommender
systems, that influence content consumption practices driven by digital first personalities. First, the
article applies cultural intermediation to celebrity, social media influencers and algorithms to
highlight how media is produced and distributed by new forms of intermediation. This section
outlines the new players in social media, how the value of media content is transferred from one
stakeholder group to another and how algorithms increasingly place prominence on particular
types of content. The article then presents fieldwork from several digital agencies that are
responsible for creating the digital first personality role. These agencies are demonstrable of those
that produce commercially oriented content alongside other more public affairs-oriented content.
Finally, the article argues that digital first personalities are crucial actors within cultural inter-
mediation to ensure public issues remain visible to those stakeholders who are most impacted by
timely information on societal issues.
Keywords
Cultural intermediation, digital first personality, influencers, microcelebrity, social media
Introduction
‘We are more inclined to work with a lifestyle blogger than a celebrity’ (LA-based social influ-
encer agency).
Corresponding author:
Jonathon Hutchinson, University of Sydney, Department of Media and Communication, Room N233 John Woolley Building
(A20), Manning Road, Camperdown, NSW 2006, Australia.
Email: jonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au
Convergence: The International
Journal of Research into
New Media Technologies
1–17
ªThe Author(s) 2019
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/1354856519858921
journals.sagepub.com/home/con

The construction of meaning has traditionally been undertaken by a number of stakeholders
including institutions, humans and non-human actors, as a process to transfer information and its
value from one group of individuals to another. This is the starting point of intermediation.
Recently, two new actors have emerged within the digital media ecology through cultural inter-
mediation: social media influencers and automated media systems engaging algorithms. Cultural
intermediation (Bourdieu, 1984) as a framework is a useful way to understand emerging social and
cultural forms as a result of new media technologies. Cultural intermediation describes how
meaning and its value, often referred to as social capital, can be exchanged across digital platforms
between different stakeholder groups (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2014), and for knowledge
and expertise exchange (Hutchinson, 2017). The latest iteration of cultural intermediation includes
the agency of platforms, social media influencers and increasingly algorithms. Understanding this
new form of cultural intermediation is crucial to enable items of public importance to remain
visible.
Social influencers, which have previously been referred to as microcelebrities (Marwick,
2013; Senft, 2013) and digital influencers (Abidin, 2016), are a particular subset of cultural
intermediaries. Through their developed expertise to identify ‘cool’ boundary objects, they are
able to engage in multiple media production practices to demonstrate the value of those objects
to their large audiences. Examples of this practice include Zoella who often engages her audi-
ence with the products from her latest shopping haul (revealing the contents of one’s shopping
bag), Evan’s Tube who engages his younger audience with an ‘unboxing’ of the latest Lego kit,
or Fun for Louis who is often travelling to exotic locations to reveal its most appealing side. In
each instance of these social influencers producing content, they engage in high levels of media
literacy to transfer the value of the chosen product or service to their large fan base: a trust-
worthy, word-of-mouth news sharing technique. They will typically do this across a number of
social media platforms, including their TikTok channel for the behind-the-scenes content, the
Instagram platform for the ‘hype’ photo or Insta-Story, and a YouTube video to engage their
largest audience.
The second emerging aspect of cultural intermediation is the algorithmic arena, which to a large
extent describes how automation is undertaken across digital media platforms. As Gillespie (2014:
167) notes, algorithms ‘are encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output,
based on specified calculations’. Within a media ecology that sees significantly more content
produced than can be consumed, algorithms, in one sense, are seen as mechanisms to assist users in
finding and consuming content that is relevant to their interests. In most cases, this manifests as a
recommender system, which is represented as ‘Recommended for you’, ‘Up Next’ or ‘You will
Like’ types of automated mechanisms. However, there is an increasing body of literature, which is
described in detail below, that challenges the bias, power and relationships with content, society
and culture that are represented by automated media systems.
Cultural intermediation that combines both social influencers and algorithms, then, acts as a
process for media visibility across emerging networked platforms. What has become the process of
blending private with public media (Meikle, 2016) has, as Turner (2010) highlights through the
demotic turn, enabled ordinary folk to become key influential media producers. However, these
key actors within cultural intermediation are typically engaging with the content production and
distribution process for the social media entertainment (Cunningham and Craig, 2017) benefits
such as increased social and economic capital. This cultural intermediation process is oper-
ationalized by what I argue is the digital first personality: those individuals that produce digital
content for maximum visibility by engaging social influencer publication strategies that appease
2Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

platform algorithms. In many cases, their media production focus is on commercial products and
services to increase their social and economic capital. Within the social influencer genre that
excludes fake news and disinformation, public issues, public affairs, news and current affairs are
often ignored in lieu of highly profitable alternatives.
Public issues refer to those items located within the public conversation that convey timely
information on issues that include education, politics, health, government, scientific research.
These sorts of items have a broad social significance. Public issues are a mechanism for the
public’s involvement in democratic issues that affect them (Marres, 2007) not only from a
political voting perspective, but in the concept of this article, making issues visible to the
public.
This article draws on ethnographic research conducted at a number of digital agencies in
Sydney and Los Angeles who specialize in the cultural intermediary role between social influencer
brands and services, and the platforms that publish their content. It seeks to outline the evolving
media ecology that cultural intermediation has created with social influencers and algorithms. In
doing so, it highlights the role that institutions play in both supporting social influencers and
interacting with highly influential and automated digital media platforms. The article argues that
cultural intermediation coupled with automation and social influencers may be an approach to
ensuring public issues remain at the centre of the public sphere. Through the lens of digital first
personalities, this article demonstrates the importance of critical social influencers who operate
among the leading social media platforms.
Cultural intermediation and celebrity
‘With microcelebrity, we achieve better engagement and that returns better engagement rates with
our content’ (LA-based social influencer agency).
Celebrity is important to explore as one of the key components of digital first personalities,
particularly the progression towards social influencers and microcelebrities. Boorstin (1962: 57)
notes on one of the first studies of celebrity that it is a measure of understanding ‘the person who is
known for his well-knownness’. That is, celebrity becomes a way of defining the people in the
media as somewhat different to everyday people because of how many people know of them.
However, Turner (2010) notes that celebrity took a demotic turn that sees the media celebrate
‘celebrities’ from ordinary folk. Turner’s observation is more indicative of the contemporary
media landscape due to the shrinking gap between celebrity stars and everyday folk – a point
relevant for everyday social media. While celebrity is a process of identifying those who we
perceive to be stars, it is the media system in which they operate that determines the level and
exposure of their stardom, and ultimately their level of celebrity.
The social media ecosystem has further evolved celebrity to become its own unique phe-
nomenon again. Given the breadth and speed at which one’s online personality can be exposed to
significantly large audiences, we have observed the breakaway of celebrity from traditional
broadcasting methods and towards those common within digital media. For example, the concept
of celebrity within the Hollywood system remains constant regardless of the disruptions to its
surrounding media system. However, it is the rise of celebrity within YouTube and Instagram that
have gathered much scholarly interest, namely the shift from celebrity towards microcelebrity
(Figure 1).
Hutchinson 3

The concept of microcelebrity was introduced by Senft (2008) as a way to explore the ‘cam-
girls’ phenomenon to understand how Internet users are presenting themselves as coherent branded
packages. What began as an experiment, especially through the user ‘Jennicam’, rose to notoriety
through the exposure of mainstream media coverage. This angle on celebrity studies moved
quickly towards the ‘branded me’ discourse that suggests everyday individuals have access to tools
of cultural production to become profit-making microcelebrities online. Marwick (2013: 114)
embeds microcelebrity within celebrity studies more broadly by suggesting that it ‘is a state of
being famous to a niche group of people’. However, as social media platforms become increasingly
central to people’s lives, and the marketing angle emerges that people trust people and not
advertisements (Chae, 2017), the blur between microcelebrity for niche audiences and large-scale
audiences is blurred.
However, it is important to reflect on the labour of microcelebrities in this context, where
Marwick and Boyd (2011) suggest celebrity is a performance instead of a collection of charac-
teristics. They note celebrity, especially within social media, ‘involves ongoing maintenance of a
fan base, performed intimacy, authenticity and access, and construction of a consumable persona’
(p. 140). It is the access to the celebrity’s ‘backstage’ insights, and the ability to use cultural
references to create affiliations, that provides an authenticity and enables users to become famous
to their niche groups (Marwick and Boyd, 2011). The work of Abidin (2016) on digital influencers
also becomes important here as she notes they are the combination of users who develop their
whole branded-ness offering to commercialize their exposure on social media. The combined
approach of microcelebrity and digital influencer is the basis for the social influencer aspect of the
digital first personality.
Through increased celebrity exposure, digital first personalities are the key role to ensure public
issues are represented within the cultural intermediation media environment. In the first instance,
this may be content that is created for small, niche audiences. As the content producer’s celebrity
status grows, the content may remain niche, but it is likely to appeal to a larger audience. Secondly,
social influencers are using their microcelebrity status to drive additional content production in a
co-creative manner with their audiences under the auspices of the platform algorithm. Influencers
post content regularly, they have engaging video titles for both humans and machines, and they
always encourage their fans to like, comment and subscribe to increase their visibility. In the case
Figure 1. Social and technical factors that enable microcelebrity.
4Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

of co-creation, Casey Neistat has a segment called ‘Ask me Anything’, which uses these algo-
rithmic mechanics and builds off earlier Reddit forum practices by inviting the audience to ask
their host questions. Neistat then produces a segment where he answers their questions, increasing
an audience member’s engagement, thereby using the audience members to use the platform’s
algorithm to increase visibility for his content.
Of interest in this media ecosystem is the relationship that the social and cultural use of social
influencers has on their own celebrity development. As their social influence grows, they are
socialized among their audience, where they incorporate co-creative content further into the
production methodology. In this sense, social influencers represent an evolving media production
role that is not associated with a single platform but is rather fluid across a number of spaces. As
such, their audiences are also transient in their platform selection to use the media that is produced
by social influencers. The management of producing and distributing content across a number of
social media platforms for fluent and transient audiences becomes the role of the digital agencies,
who emerge as another stakeholder within the evolving media ecosystem as a result of cultural
intermediation.
Cultural intermediation and social influencers
‘Our influencers have freedom over their reputation, creativity, and look and feel of their sites’
(LA-based social influencer agency).
There is growing body of literature describing social influencers. Business Management note
that social influencers leverage their fame for personal gain by interacting with brands and services
(Audrezet et al., 2018). Digital Health highlights the benefits of reaching and targeting patients to
exchange critical medical information through social influencer strategies (Lutkenhaus et al.,
2019). McCosker (2018) notes social influencers are critical in the mental health and support
online community beyondblue, as they assist in breaking down barriers between experts and
amateurs. He notes ‘connectors, intermediaries or influencers designate those who act with a
degree of vernacular authority to bridge professional and non-professional divides’ (p. 4751).
Interestingly, Cotter (2018) suggests that the production processes of social influencers, especially
on Instagram, are a constructed ‘game’ around its algorithm. However, what is of interest in this
article is how social influencers are a digital first personality – that is, they exist within an
emerging media ecosystem, but also have the capacity to co-create and influence positively beyond
personal gain.
Among co-creative media (Burgess and Banks, 2013) and vernacular creativity (Burgess,
2006), which incorporates cultural politics within the production process, new media technologies
and the creative industries enabled an evolving media system. Media organizations recognized this
systemic shift and offered the producer role to the audience, with varying degrees of success.
Media co-production developed from crude ‘tell us what you reckon’ types of calls-to-action, to a
more sophisticated and collaborative production methodology. User consumption patterns were
also disrupted from traditional forms of standardized timing formats that scheduled programmed
media at routine times of the day, and towards more bite-sized, anywhere, anytime consumption.
However, a defining moment in this media era was the changing roles of media producers and
consumers, given the earlier scholarly criticisms of convergence culture that saw a more mediated
experience beyond a free-for-all participatory model. This is the role cultural intermediation
performs, where Hutchinson (2017) notes community managers and social media producers act as
capital translators to enable co-production. Not only did this shift in roles indicate a change in how
Hutchinson 5

producers and consumers performed content production, but it also highlights how media moves
through our lives.
Goggin et al. (2013) offer a definition for moving media that suggests media is no longer
attached to one static device but is malleable across a number of mobile devices including
smartphones, sensors and connected devices. Associating social media with moving media pro-
vides a useful lens through which to view the contemporary media environment: an everyday
social media environment that operates with platform-specific media, produced by a range of users
to reflect issues that are socially relevant. That is to say, there are a variety of users with differing
levels of content production skill, producing content to suit a number of popular social media
platforms, reaching audiences of significant size, with authentically produced content.
However, and as with most media technological advances, existing roles do not disappear, nor
are they replaced as is often suggested within times of media disruption. As Williams (1989) notes,
newspaper editorials were tweaked to suit failing economic models in the past, which limited the
diversity within this medium to suit a narrow group of consumers, led by a set of particular media
producers. The networked communication space is not outside of politics and economics, where
new forms of power have emerged. As Street (2011) astutely notes, network power takes the form
of access, resource, discursive and networked power. While access and resource forms of power
might indicate that more affluent media organizations may have increased access to these net-
works, it is interesting to note that there are other significant discursive and network powers at
work within contemporary everyday social media practices. The discursive and network power
attributes take the form of users, cultural intermediaries such as social influencers, demonstrating
unique communicative capacities to operate and influence within these spaces. Typically, these
users build networks that information can flow through, where they place themselves centrally to
manage the flow of information – nodes with a high level of connections to other nodes.
The contemporary everyday social media environment is producing its own unique media
experts that embody existing media production skills and tailor those towards new and emerging
platforms and audiences. These users are the social influencers and are the latest iteration of what
the French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (1984) refers to as the cultural intermediary. In his defining
work, Bourdieu notes cultural intermediaries are individuals concerned with specific groups in
society acting as intermediaries between different social classes: someone ‘in the middle’ to
facilitate cultural production. Negus notes, the ‘central strength of the notion of cultural inter-
mediaries is that it places an emphasis on those workers who come in-between creative artists and
consumers (or, more generally, production and consumption)’ (Negus, 2010: 503). Hutchinson
(2013: 31) suggests the cultural intermediary role is ‘with a focus on successfully negotiating the
collaborative production process of cultural artefacts within the creative industries’. With social
influencers as intermediaries, they are skilled at interpreting fringe creativity and bringing this to
new publics, audiences, communities and groups in authentic media forms. They are capital
translators (Hutchinson, 2017) that have the ability of converting social, cultural and economic
capital into other forms of capital.
An example of a social influencer operating as a cultural intermediary includes two popular
social media influencers, Dan and Phil, who have developed a successful media career out of
screen-casting games. To do this, the two YouTube influencers or microcelebrities play games
such as Minecraft and The Sims while narrating their gameplay with arguably comedic storytelling.
Each video they create is approximately 20 min, and while they primarily post one YouTube video
each day, they are prolific across several other social media platforms including Facebook, Twitter
and Snapchat. Through their production strategy to create new forms of media, they are engaging
6Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

in fringe creativity that has found its own niche, and sizeably large, audience. They also engage in
production strategies that address the YouTube algorithm for visibility: they use Search Engine
Optimization (keywords, links unique YouTube image), publish content frequently, use a call to
action to engage their users – usually ‘leave a comment below’, and incorporate effective use of
video playlists. Simultaneously, they build on existing traditional media strategies to make
entertaining content through their own celebrity status, to broadcast on their YouTube channel
which has approximately 3 million subscribers.
The Dan and Phil example above is typical of the taste-making work that occurs across social
media platforms. This cultural intermediation is reflective of how Powers (2015) frames the
relationship between online cultural trends and new digital economies. She notes, cultural inter-
mediation is ‘the process by which art, music, and other forms of cultural production circulate,
assume meaning, and gain value’ (p. 4), suggesting the most adapt cultural intermediaries observe
popular trends online, add meaning to those trends and increase its value in the process. This
creative work in the digital economy is what Duffy and Hund (2015) refer to as having it all, which
is, as they describe, the rhetorical tropes associated with the entrepreneurial femininity of fashion
blogging. They note ‘predestined passionate work, staging the glam life, and carefully curated
social sharing ...obscures the labor, discipline, and capital necessary to emulate these standards’
(p. 2). In both Powers’ work and Duffy and Hund’s accounts of intermediation within the digital
economy, they describe the expertise that social influencers have to identify emerging trends, add
their taste-making skills and produce media that enables their entrepreneurial capacity.
The taste-making capacity is typical of the intervention roles that social influencers have in
comparison with traditional celebrities. They are indicative of how the new form of microcelebrity
is built around the creation of digital media for niche audiences, to be consumed across a number of
social media platforms. While many of these social influencers receive little professional training
as media presenters, although they do have access to YouTube content producer guidelines through
its Creator Studio, they develop those skills as influencers for large-scale, niche online audiences.
The shift in their celebrity ‘expertise’, coupled with the role cultural intermediation plays within an
evolving media ecology, is the basis for the digital first personality as an intermediary that can
translate value between social media and broadcast audiences. As the notion of celebrity shifts in
this environment, it is crucial to understand how it has evolved and how it might shift in the coming
years. Social influencers are only part of the concept of digital first personalities, where under-
standing their alignment with social media platform algorithms is also required.
Cultural intermediation and algorithms
‘We make sure our brands achieve efficiency and predictability. We are like where tech meets
human’ (Speakr, LA-based social influencer agency).
The field of Critical Algorithm Studies has been occupied with exploring the role algorithms
and automation have on our everyday lives (Anderson, 2011; Beer, 2009, 2017; Gillespie, 2016).
Given the extent of media content that is produced, published and distributed on a daily basis, users
require a means to make sense of it, or as de Certeau (1984) would argue, to make sense of the
space through a constituted set of signs. This is precisely how the media industries have instituted
the role of the algorithm for media users: to enable media content consumers to navigate and
indeed consume content that makes sense to them. That is, for media consumers to have access and
capacity to consume media content they enjoy and find interesting. However, Wilson (2017: 138)
refers to the role of algorithms and the everyday, suggesting that although these technologies are
Hutchinson 7

ubiquitous and pervasive, they also have an impact on power relations, confronting users by
‘shifting views and our complex relationship with technologies’. Algorithms pose a unique
approach in media automation for consumption ease, with unrivalled determination of social,
cultural and ultimately economic and political discourse.
Just and Latzer (2017) highlight the role of algorithms as non-human, political intermediaries
with tangible social implications. In an environment that is increasingly reliant on automated
algorithmic selection across human resources, welfare, media recommendation and citizen mon-
itoring for example, these scholars make an argument for the ‘co-evolution’ of algorithms and
actors. They suggest non-human intermediaries may interject with increased individualization,
which results in increased inequalities through decreased transparency, controllability and pre-
dictability. A co-evolution process would include increased transparency of algorithms as third-
wave cultural intermediation to assist in addressing increased inequalities, enabling digital first
personalities to engage in public issues beyond commercialization alone.
The relationship between non-human intermediaries and algorithms is further extended by
Gillespie (2016: 61) who notes, ‘cultural objects are designed in anticipation of the value people
may find in them and means by which they may circulate’. Through the concept of trending,
Gillespie highlights how algorithmic selection and recommendation shapes digital culture – it is
the amplification of popular content that also has implications for users. Morris (2015) suggests the
term infomediaries represents the layer of non-human intermediaries that are responsible for that
amplification of content, or cultural discourse. Infomediaries are ‘organizations that monitor, mine
and mediate the use of digital cultural products (e.g. e-Books, music files, video streams, etc.) as
well as audience responses to those products via social and new media technologies’ (p. 447).
Infomediaries, then, embody the concept of Multichannel Networks (MCNs) engaging with
algorithmic affordances to expose and amplify their influencers. The implications of this, as Morris
notes, can direct the cultural narrative, inform the development of new platform creation, and are
flawed for users who game the mechanism for their own personal gain. In itself, this aspect of non-
human intermediaries interjects a new form of pervasive class system. Class systems may be
embedded in the cultural intermediation argument first offered by Bourdieu (1984) but is only part
of the cause and effect when the cultural tastes of content are passed on to a non-human actor such
as an algorithm. Algorithms as cultural intermediaries preference efficiency over equality, and
while algorithms are developed by humans, it is the inequality of their operation that supports
pervasive class systems.
The pervasiveness of algorithms is at its best and worst in the YouTube platform. As a com-
mercially oriented and privately owned platform, YouTube’s algorithmic opaqueness remains high
and the capacity to pull apart its ‘black-box’ is non-existent. However, we can examine the
everyday practice on this media platform as emblematic of the broader media ecology in which
cultural intermediation takes place. As such, YouTube becomes a significant flagship for cultural
intermediation – an automated media system that recommends content consumption based on the
datafication of its users.
The twinning of algorithmic calculations with the user interface is at play through a number of
mechanisms in the YouTube platform. New users are presented with a series of Recommended
Channels based on topics, for example, Talks Shows,Boxing,Trailers or Reality TV to name a few.
These suggestions are based on the basic information that is accessed via the user’s Google
account. However, as the user enters more detailed information, for example, a user’s searches,
likes or dislikes on videos, or comments, the platform’s recommendations are increasingly tar-
geted. This algorithmic training process, it would seem, is the underlying principle for YouTube’s
8Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

automated recommendation systems such as the continuous ‘Up Next’ viewing mechanism, which
operates alongside its ‘Trending’ recommender system.
So, while it can be argued that on the one hand algorithms are indeed signposts that assist users
to navigate a system with a cornucopia of media, it can also be said that the recommender systems
are skewing user access to content. This skewed content consumption pattern is demonstrated by
the recent longitudinal research by Ba¨rtl (2018: 16), who notes ‘that a vast majority of on average
85%of all views goes to a small minority of 3%of all channels’, a figure that fails to support the
reach of public issues. He further argues that a key factor that ‘accelerates the convergence of
views towards a few content providers, is YouTube’s search and recommendation algorithms’
(p. 30). Both of these arguments, the user training of algorithms and the automated recommender
systems, highlight the emerging power relationships between content producers and users and the
important role that code and, especially within the context of this article, platforms play for
information dissemination. This platform bias through recommender systems further pro-
blematizes cultural intermediation that preferences popular content, which is further compounded
by influential media producers, the social influencers.
While the distinct relationship between content producer and fan seems obvious on YouTube,
there are a number of other actors that operate between these two roles during the content pro-
duction and consumption process. The cultural intermediaries are the social influencers who are
translating products, brands, cultures and society to niche audiences on a number of social media
platforms through their algorithms. However, another more secondary level of cultural inter-
mediaries includes the algorithms that position the content for increased visibility. Here it is the
work of digital agencies that broker the cultural intermediation process for digital first personal-
ities. These ‘other’ cultural intermediaries also demonstrate high levels of expertise to translate
value from numerous forms of capital, for example, cultural and social, and guide their social
influencers to further increase the effects of their communication efforts. More importantly, digital
agencies that are often folded into the MCN category offer content producers a way to work with
platform algorithms to ensure their content is seen by as many viewers as possible. The primary
goal of these digital agencies is to create, manage and promote digital first personalities.
Digital agencies creating digital first personalities
Increasingly, the media organization production methodology is to publish content across digital
properties such as Instagram or YouTube, with formally programmed content across its traditional
broadcasting spaces. For example, the 3-min YouTube clip will be used as a ‘teaser’ for the 26-min
podcast that will also be programmed into the national radio network. This is the modus operandi
of most, if not all, media organizations. Yet this content production and distribution model presents
the problem that media organizations assume its broadcast celebrities possess the ability to interact
across large, networked audiences. Similarly, this publishing process suggests that all social
influencers have the publishing expertise of trained media professionals, including the technical
skills to understand how platform algorithms operate. It is within this overlapping space that digital
agencies have created a burgeoning industry: to up-skill influential media users to a high-profile
celebrity. Significantly, these agencies take on the role of cultural intermediaries in that they have
the ability to translate the significance of multiple stakeholder groups for the successful production
of cultural artefacts (Hutchinson, 2016).
Cunningham et al. (2016) note the media ecology with YouTube’s 10-year history and the
existing traditional Hollywood-style industry as a clash between cultures. According to these
Hutchinson 9

scholars, companies such as Netflix, Google, Amazon and Facebook have a perpetual beta,
scalable and rapid prototyping fall into a ‘NoCal’ category, while Hollywood with its premium
content and time-tested mass communication strategies fall into a ‘SoCal’ category. At the
intersection point, we see the emergence of MCNs as a form of digital agency and as an inter-
mediary that demonstrates innovation in both categories.
On the [NoCal] side, MCNs are attempting to provide value-added services superior to basic YouTube
analytics, with programmatics and pioneering attempts at management of scale and volume. On the
[SoCal] side, they are managing a quite different class of entry-to-mid-level talent, who bring suc-
cessful audience development and clear ideas about the roots of their success with them. (n.p.)
Within this framework, MCNs and digital agencies are enabling the high innovation and agility
of the social influencer, to operate with the expertise of the somewhat slower yet arguably superior
production quality of broadcast celebrities.
The following two case studies demonstrate that digital agencies are the cultural inter-
mediation example of co-creation between social influencers engaging in algorithmically
inspired production practices and the broader screen industry. Building on Cunningham et al.’s
work within the MCN environment, my ethnographic research highlights similar approaches for
digital first personalities within the digital agency space. I was able to spend approximately 200
h in the online environments that each digital agency manages, while ‘hanging out’ (Ito
¯, 2010)
with them in their office spaces for up to 2 days at a time. Digital agencies demonstrate expertise
in the ability to interface between social influencers, brands and services, which draw on the
professional Hollywood screen ecology.
Marquee Studios, Sydney
In the Sydney industry, Marquee Studios provided an example of how digital agencies are
interfacing between increasingly popular social media influencers and existing institutional
stakeholders.
Marquee Studios is set in an old building in the developing start-up and digital agency precinct within
Chippendale, Sydney, New South Wales. The business shares its office with a number of other
businesses, suggesting they have the capacity to rapidly prototype projects, are perpetually in a beta
phase, and also are creating experimental innovations at a rapid rate. Within their business, they have a
slight separation within the space where the senior staff sit in one area and the production staff sit in
another area – a clear developing business that operates on a lean budget yet is adorned in high level
brand props that work with them (ProActive, Maybelline, Twitter, etc.). (Hutchinson, Fieldnotes, 2017)
I interviewed Tom Maynard, the CEO of Marquee Studios, about how the business operates and
its evolution. Tom notes:
Marquee Studios is three things. First, it creates brands, second it does events, and third it creates
content. Marquee Studios creates brands in a non-mainstream media environment, for example, we are
interested in creating socially aware spaces that are also aligned with brands. To do this, we have
created three platforms. Amplify is our main brand or platform and it’s considered eighty-five percent
female and fifteen percent male; Beautify is a lifestyle and health platform which is ninety-five percent
female and five percent male; and Super Mega Awesome is for young children ages zero to five. We
also typically create events like the AmplifyLive event, meet ups and meet and greets. Content is
10 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

anything from meme generation through to videos through to Twitter and Instagram updates, for
example.
I asked Tom what Marquee Studios is and he said it was difficult to describe exactly what they
do beyond the three platforms. He continued by suggesting the business has changed considerably
since its conception in 2015. ‘You could explain it as native advertising, but it’s just not what we
do’. He also said a way to think about Marquee Studios is ‘if MTV started again but as a Dolly
magazine’. In this statement, Tom is suggesting they are taking appealing individuals from niche
social groups and developing them into highly exposed celebrities. Marquee Studios sees itself as a
developing agency that takes the ‘authentic’ celebrity skill of the social influencer and develops
this to appeal to a larger market – the digital first personality model. Simultaneously, they are
exposing the social influencer to a larger audience through their media production strategies.
One key aspect of Marquee Studios is how they build social influencer authenticity with their
engaged audience. To build an increased level of ‘buy-in’ from their younger audience members,
they blend brands with public issues, and this is crucial to ensure their social influences are
engaging with authentic media production and branding. Authenticity, in this capacity, becomes a
crucial currency for social influencers to engage their audience, so as the communication process is
beyond the selling of products and services, but also has the seamless integration of areas of
concern with their audience. Marwick and Boyd (2011) note, it is the backstage insights and
cultural references that make media authentic, two media production concepts not lost on young,
teen audiences. Social influencers are able to build their microcelebrity status because of the
authenticity included in their content production methodology. Authenticity is the content ‘hook’
that makes the media co-produced by social influencers and digital agencies significantly more
appealing to audiences than traditional celebrity-based media.
An example of how Marquee Studios blends commerciality with public issues is through its
recent ProActive advertising campaign. ProActive is a skin treatment product that targets younger
people as a treatment for acne and minor skin disorders. Marquee Studios have successfully
combined the marketability affordances provided by ProActive and, through its Beautify platform,
were able to create a social media content series that addresses issues that affect young people. The
series of content addressed body image, cyberbullying, and teenage relationships among other
popular topics, which align with what Burgess and Matamoros-Ferna´ndez (2016) define as public
issues that are of public concern and that often involve uncertainty or debate. Marquee Studios
combined public issues with a commercial product, thereby satisfying the commercial require-
ments of all stakeholders involved, while also championing public issues. This campaign was
produced in consultation with the Beautify audience who suggested the sort of content that should
be produced.
The Beautify platform was specifically built to address a young female audience, where
Maynard notes ‘it has a 95%female audience compared to the other 5%of gender representation’.
The website describes the platform as, ‘workshops, panel discussions, and networking with
creators and industry experts ...Beautify brings together some of the world’s biggest industry
influencers’ (Amplify, 2018). Maynard nuances this further by suggesting ‘Beautify is a blend of
brands with public issues. It is designed to combine positive beauty messages with brands to create
a content series that promotes body confidence with its audience’. Maynard explained that Mar-
quee Studios were attempting to address the issues surrounding young women and the pressure
they experience through their media consumption on how to look and behave. The campaign
engaged a number of emerging LGBTQ social influencers to produce segments, directly alongside
Hutchinson 11

established social influencers such as Fonzy Gomez and Tyde Levi. The result of this particular
campaign yielded a substantial number of conversations with young people about their insecurities
in their physical appearance. Maynard recalls many of the participants felt positive after engaging
with the social influencers and the community of users that emerged around this public issue. In
this context, we see the media ecology skills of the digital agency engage in its cultural inter-
mediation role to bring professional media production, social influencers, advertising, public
issues and large audiences together around digital objects.
The integration of influencers within these mass communication strategies is typical for the new
digital agency industry that operates alongside the digital first personality. This process is somewhat
different to the historical format, which was successful for media organizations engaging the work of
traditional media celebrities. The media ecology of social influencers and digital agencies sees the
latter encouraging the former to create content that is platform-agnostic: that is, create content that
can be published on a series of different platforms from social, .coms, podcasts, e-books, television
series or live events. At the same time, the agencies engage in training their social influencers how to
work alongside the platform’s algorithmic processes for increased visibility. Marquee Studios are not
privy to the algorithm’s design, but they do have a depth of knowledge for successful media exposure
in a media recommendation environment. The key message the digital agency is projecting is that the
influencer has to go to wherever the audience is and be adaptable to that space. Further, the new
media ecology process clearly integrates the network celebrity through the sociomaterialization
process to produce authentic and relevant media content for its audience. Outside of the content
production itself, the social influencers require the strategic edge of the digital agency to achieve this
highly skilled media content production.
LA-based social influencer digital agency
Digital agency 2 is a digital agency for social influencers, with offices in Los Angeles, United
States, and London, United Kingdom, and requested they remain anonymous for this research. I
travelled to the Los Angeles office to ask two of the talent managers how the media system is
shifting (Figure 2), especially when the agency is located within the hub of the Hollywood
celebrity system. Digital agency 2 are based at the top of a newish looking building, centrally
located in the middle of Hollywood. I started by asking two of their talent managers what Digital
agency 2 is and how they operate.
We are an agency that is more than just a brand. We have a collection of talent managers and
coordinators that work with publishing, licensing, brokering brand deals, content development, and
events. One of our core business goals is to diversify branding outside of the social media platforms,
for example how influencers can develop their career beyond their social media handles. (Digital
agency 2)
This insight from this one agency is common among many of the supporting digital agencies
that work with social influencers and is key to understanding the contemporary media ecosystem.
From the digital agency perspective, the geolocation of the audience is irrelevant in that they are
more concerned with getting the content to as many people globally as possible. That is, the
audience could be on television, reading a book, scrolling through Instagram or augmenting
content in their loungeroom. The focus of Digital agency 2 is to work with social influencers to
build their brand across a range of publishing spaces, and work with the audiences across multiple
mediums.
12 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

We take the collaborative approach to extend the reach of our influencers. So that might be by either
having an emerging influencer work alongside someone like Zoella, or take them outside of the
platform entirely. In that case, we often get our influencers to appear with established celebrities. The
celebrities love it too, because they are often exposed to large and new audiences.
The talent managers within this particular digital agency also mentioned that often many of the
audience members follow the influencers to the platform on which they are working.
At the core of this content production model is the authenticity of the social influencer –
authenticity is the currency that distinguishes influencers from brands. Authenticity within the
influencer field is unique in that it is similar to brand loyalty however it is perceived to be
somewhat more genuine if it is performed by individuals and not brands. It is what happens beyond
the camera that gives any influencer valuable authenticity – their backstage insights. I asked the
talent managers how important authenticity is and what they look for when they work with an
influencer:
We want to know what they are beyond their online person. What is their personal interest? This is to
build the authenticity angle, to understand that they are attempting to look beyond landing the big
contract – where do they want to be in five or ten years? What are their career goals? Who are they
when they are not behind the camera?
In a similar process to Marquee Studios, Digital agency 2 is also looking to develop the social
influencer personalities into large-scale celebrities. To undertake this strategy, they enable the
influencer to produce content in their own way as ‘the influencers know their audience better than
we do’, but they are also assisting them in producing strategic content, working alongside
Figure 2. The central location of digital agencies between its multiple stakeholders.
Hutchinson 13

algorithms, encouraging them to collaborate with other influencers, and bringing their branded self
to a larger scale audience. This approach ensures the authenticity is maintained and their niche
audience retains its integrity, while scaling towards a larger audience. In both digital agency
examples, they operate within the digital first personality framework which promotes the algor-
ithmically aware social influencer first, then seeks to develop the traditional celebrity thereafter.
The digital first personality inverts our understanding of celebrity through the cultural inter-
mediation framework that includes social influencers and algorithmic media. Instead of being a
celebrity alone, or a social media influencer, the digital first personality enables the integration of
the two approaches into the one role. The digital first personality also has the technical skills, or
can seek out those skills, to align their content production with any given platform’s algorithm to
ensure it will receive increased visibility. The digital first personality locates celebrity in the digital
media space in the first instance through their ability to embody the required skills, which is then
transferred into larger audiences often including traditional media spaces.
Conclusion
While the media ecology continues to evolve to incorporate new technologies and social appro-
priations of those technologies, so too are the media industries that surround them. Digital first
personalities often preference content that privileges an increase in social and economic capital, in
lieu of exposure to public issues. In this scenario, it is crucial there are not only digital first per-
sonalities that represent the so-called third-wave cultural intermediaries, but also digital agencies,
MCNs and other important cultural institutions to ensure public issues do not disappear from the
public’s attention. While the reliance on social media strengthens the ‘knownness’ for the celebrity
role, what is of significance here is the iterative development of social influencers. While they
produce content that speaks to their audience, they are highly skilled at integrating the feedback
Figure 3. The digital agency is the centre of the new media ecology for social influencers.
14 Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies XX(X)

from that audience into their content production. This process results in high audience ‘buy-in’ as
well as bolstering the authenticity aspect for their fans. In other words, the digital first personalities
make their production decisions based on the feedback from their fans, but they also create content
to satisfy the affordances of the algorithms that drive the platforms on which they distribute their
content.
MCNs and digital agencies enable influencers to publish on platforms with high levels of
visibility: the algorithm that creates exposure today will evolve for the new environment tomor-
row, and creators and agencies need to keep pace with these changes. This evolving shift of the
media ecology suggests that digital agencies and MCNs are at the centre of the communication
paradigm (Figure 3), with a variety of platforms and their social influencers surrounding them. The
concept that the audience is fluid between one distribution outlet and the next depends on type of
digital first personality they are following and the sort of content that they produce. For example,
Tom Maynard described the new media ecosystem in the following way:
The cultural intermediary framework is at work, especially as a process of capital translation
that is facilitated by social influencers operating within automated algorithmic recommender
systems. But it is the role of the MCNs and the agencies that assist the digital first personalities to
optimize their content for the platforms – the digital first personality can remain focused on content
production and audience engagement while the digital agencies and MCNs assist them in readying
their content for each specialist platform.
While the social influencer is in the process of increasing their cultural capital through their
creative work with their audience on multiple platforms, a first tier of cultural capital translation,
the digital agencies are conducting the second tier of economic translation. This process is the
foundation for the digital first personality who operates within a media environment that is gov-
erned by cultural intermediation. This is obvious within commercial content production, but, as the
ProActive case study suggests, these strategies can be transferred to public issues, suggesting a new
wave of digital first personalities is required. Public issue digital first personalities is an area that
requires additional research to understand how to maintain the innovation of cultural and economic
capital across Internet platforms, while also promoting the public’s exposure to public issues.
Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Tom Maynard for providing industry insights, Mike Williams for
his input on the digital first personality concept and Dr Chris Chesher for his guidance in devel-
oping this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship and/or
publication of this article: The author received financial support for the research of this article
through a University of Sydney Faculty Research Support Scheme (FRSS). The authorship was
funded by the University of Sydney’s Sydney Social Science and Humanities Advanced Research
Centre (SSSHARC) Launch Fellowship Scheme.
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Author Biography
Jonathon Hutchinson (Ph.D. 2013, ARC Centre of Excellence for Creative Industries and Innovation, QUT)
is a lecturer in Online Communication and Media at the University of Sydney. He is currently a Visiting
Research Fellow on the Algorithmed Public Sphere project at the Hans Bredow Institute, Hamburg Germany.
His research explores Public Service Media, cultural intermediation, everyday social media, automated
media, and algorithms in media. He is the NSW Representative on the Executive Committee for the Aus-
tralian and New Zealand Communication Association (ANZCA), the Secretary for the International Public
Service Media Association, RIPE, and is the current Program Chair for the Association of Internet Research
(AoIR). Hutchinson is an award-winning author and his latest book is Cultural Intermediaries: Audience
Participation and Media Organisations (2017), published through Palgrave Macmillan.
Hutchinson 17