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Selected Papers of #AoIR2020:
The 21st Annual Conference of the
Association of Internet Researchers
Dublin, Ireland / 28-31 October 2020
A GOOD LIFE? CRITICAL FEMINIST APPROACHES TO INFLUENCER
ECOLOGIES
Social media platforms are widely lauded as bastions for entrepreneurial self-
actualisation and creative autonomy, offering an answer to historically exclusive and
hierarchical creative industries as routes to employability and success. Crystal Abidin
defines influencers as “everyday, ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively
large following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of
their personal lives and lifestyles” (2016, p.3). In 2020, influencer content can lie on a
spectrum of amateur to highly professional; mythologies about influencers’
independence have also been complicated as we catch glimpses of managers,
photographers and PR teams. Social media influencers are envied by audiences as
having achieved ‘the good life’, one in which they are able to ‘do what they love’ for a
living (Duffy 2017). This is augmented by the supposed ‘authenticity’ of self-presentation
as it also hinges on personal disclosure, capturing domestic life and ‘backstage’
moments. Despite this ostensive accessibility and relatability, today’s high-profile
influencer culture continues to be shaped by ‘preexisting gendered and racial scripts
and their attendant grammars of exclusion’ as Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012) argued in the
early days of socially mediated entrepreneurship (p. 89; see also Bishop, 2017). In
Western contexts only a narrow subset of white, cis-gender, and heterosexual
YouTubers, Instagrammers, TikTokers, and Twitch streamers tend to achieve visibility
as social media star-creators, and celebratory discourses of diversity and fairness mask
problematic structures that exclude marginalized identities from opportunities to attain
success.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the lack of diversity among the digital creator community fails
to register in popular culture, shrouded as it is by cheering assertions about Internet-
enabled diversity and the well-worn promise of meritocracy. A key aim of this panel is
thus to draw attention to marginalized creator communities and subjectivities, including
women, non-white, and queer creators, all of whom face higher barriers to entry and
success. The panelists, moreover, draw attention to new systems of inequality emerging
at the interface of technology and creative industry, including platform algorithms and
technological tools that purport to scout out “brand friendly content”, that exacerbate
other forms of inequality that have deep roots in the media and cultural industries (Gill,
2013).
More broadly, by taking seriously both the practices and discourses of social media
influencers, the panellists aim to challenge popular denigrations of influencers as vapid,
frivolous, or eager to freeload. We locate such critiques in longstanding dismissals of
feminized cultural production (Levine, 2013) and argue, instead, that we need to take
seriously the role of influencers in various social, economic, and political configurations.
In this manner, we capture more about the various ways users try to wield the power of
these platforms, however lopsided these attempts may be. These collected analyses
reveal the complexity of financial co-optation, where users are both rewarded and
punished for taking risks, speaking out, and being ‘real’ for their followers, according to
a capricious calculus whose contours are opaque to many. Consequently, these papers
draw out moments of political and social intent however muddied they become as they
engage with the economic imperatives of platforms. This panel offers new research that
makes significant interventions into the ongoing conversation about influencer
ecologies. To that end, this interdisciplinary panel utilises critical feminist methods that
emphasize diverse forms of value and meaning-making, to explore the culture of
influencers within the wider contexts of marketing, education, politics, and family life.
We reject claims examining influencer cultures is niche; as life is increasingly lived
contingent to social media platforms, influencer cultures offer glimpses into how our
identities and outputs will become increasingly commodified.
References
Abidin, C. (2016). “Aren’t these just young, rich women doing vain things online?”:
Influencer selfies as subversive frivolity. Social Media+ Society, 2(2),
2056305116641342.
Banet-Weiser, S. (2012). AuthenticTM: The politics of ambivalence in a brand culture.
New York, NY: NYU Press.
Bishop, S. (2017). Beauty for Girls, Pranks for Boys–It’s the Same Old Gender
Stereotypes for YouTube Stars’. The Conversation, 4.
Gill, R. (2013). Inequalities in media work. In Behind the Screen (pp. 189-205). Palgrave
Macmillan, New York.
Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) getting paid to do what you love: gender, social media, and
aspirational work. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Levine, E. (Ed.). (2015). Cupcakes, pinterest, and ladyporn: Feminized popular culture
in the early twenty-first century. University of Illinois Press.
ALGORITHMIC INFLUENCER MANAGEMENT TOOLS: A FEMINIST
CRITIQUE OF PEG AND THE EYE
Introduction
This paper explores two proprietary algorithmic influencer management tools designed
to support marketers in selecting influencers for marketing campaigns. Influencers are
categorised and ranked according to subjective judgements of ‘brand safety’. Tools
deepen surveillance of influencer content by advertising stakeholders, who hope to
predict and manage the likelihood of influencer ‘scandals’, and to hegemonize
influencer behaviour more broadly. For example, L’Oreals Chief Digital Officer, Cedric
Dordain, told The Drum ‘we want more detail about the background of the influencers.
From what they've posted in the past – not just on Instagram but on any social platform
and any website or blog or forum’. The risk-management software sold within influencer
marketing industries is in line with often discriminatory risk-management software used
across sectors, such as HR (Gray & Suri, 2019) or healthcare (Eubanks, 2017).
Both software levy historic data from influencer profiles and campaigns to support
automated decision-making processes. Firstly I consider Peg, a UK-based influencer
marketing tool enabling stakeholders to identify brand-safe influencers. Secondly, The
Eye is a custom application designed by ‘marketing services and media company’
StyleHaul using their proprietary data to ‘help brands see who the best influencers for
their campaign’. StyleHaul ceased operations in 2019, and it is unclear what became of
The Eye (launched in 2017). The tool remains a valuable case study, however, as its
operations are comparable with competitors such as Traakr, Upfluence, and Mavrck.
This paper seeks to provide a theoretical and conceptual framework for understanding
how brand safety is predicted and measured using digital tools in marketing industries.
This framework synthesises feminist critiques of ostensibly participatory influencer
industries (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2017; Oh & Oh, 2017) with close attention to critical
algorithmic studies (Bucher, 2018; Cheney-Lippold, 2017; Gillespie, 2017). I
demonstrate how value-laded algorithmic judgements map onto well-worn hierarchies of
desirability and employability, originating from systemic and historic bias along the lines
of class, race and gender.
Methodology
Often the fetishization of the complexity of algorithms is a ‘red herring, a piece of
information that distracts from the other’ (Bucher, 2018: 44). There are no guarantees
that cracking open the black box will reveal secrets or make the roots of bias or
discrimination visible in algorithmic systems. There is methodological opportunity in
studying the ancillary content that surrounds algorithms and their formations; including
‘press releases, conference papers on machine learning techniques… media reports,
blog posts’ in addition to other texts and resources (Bucher, 2018: 61).
Thus, my methodology involved gathering background information about Peg and
StyleHaul including White Papers, About Us pages, marketing and press guidance,
podcasts, trade press coverage and conference presentations. I negotiated access to
Peg for one month, and used the ‘walkthrough method’, combining STS and cultural
studies approaches to systematically analyse Peg’s ‘technological mechanisms and
embedded cultural references’ (Light, Burgess, & Duguay, 2018: 882). I walked-through
the Peg platform as a brand, interrogating its features, options and guidelines. Data
gathered was coded for information about the tools and their expected use (for brands,
influencers, management), representations of algorithmic processes and information
about categorisation, predictions and ranking cultures. Despite the clear limitations of
being unable to reveal how algorithmic tools work, the patchwork approach employed in
this paper can demonstrate how such tools are conceived, sold and embedded within
marketing industries and promotional cultures.
Findings
I concentrate on three primary findings: I consider how discrimination manifests within
both Peg’s brand safety and audience consistency scores, and in StyleHaul’s
measurement of influencer face shape. Taken together, these examples illustrate how
bias becomes baked into software, and how this impacts influencers’ employment
opportunities and broad visibility.
Peg gives each influencer a ‘brand safety’ score, measuring instances of profanity in an
influencers’ video metadata (titles, tags) and spoken words in video content using
language processing. It is clear that Peg’s algorithms cannot measure context or attend
to sustained and intricate intersections of raced, class and gendered identity within
social life. For example, the word ‘queer’ is coded as profanity, lowering brand safety
scores. This categorisation speaks to a longstanding sexualisation of queer people, in
addition to the more recent examples of the demonetization of LGBTQ+ content on
YouTube. Similarly n*gger is coded as a naughty word, a decision that shows how
minority groups can be penalised for reclaiming words that have historically been used
against them.
Peg measures a like/dislike ratio, designed to anticipate creator scandals. In practice, it
measures an audience’s tolerance for creator behaviours. For example, gaming vlogger
Pewdiepie’s use of anti-Semitic language has been widely profiled, yet he has high
audience consistency score of 9/10. Indeed, influencers whose brands are built on
being controversial tend to have very consistent like/dislike ratios, a positive metric for
their overall Safety Score. This score is not measuring how offensive or unjust an
influencers’ content is in context. Rather, measuring dislikes from a creators’ own
audience is a proxy for measuring that audience’s tolerance of such content. Backlash
is uneven. It is important to recognise that women and people of colour are more
vulnerable to trolling attacks that diminish an Audience Consistency score and overall
Safety Score, both used by brands make recruitment decisions.
Finally, for The Eye the ‘the shape of a creator’s face impacts post performance more
than any other facial characteristic measured’. Although StyleHaul do not outline their
methodology for measuring face shape (or other characteristics) they show a positive
correlation between facial characteristics and beauty campaign success. In one test
‘heart shaped faces performed best’. Through social media content, influencers’ face
shapes are algorithmically processed and categorised. In this vein, The Eye reveals an
underlying influencer ‘aesthetic economy’, showing the value of the right look (Entwistle,
2002). The Eye’s categorisations reveal how raced definitioms of beauty underpin
participation in influencer industries. Mythologies of creativity and democracy, that
‘anyone can be a fashion blogger’ have informed the development and
professionalisation of influencer industries (Duffy, 2017: 4). Although the promise of
creative participation is intoxicating, algorithmic tools used by gatekeepers can
revealing the practical barriers for those hoping to make it as influencers, and creative
labourers more broadly in the UK and beyond.
References
Abidin, C. (2016). “Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?”:
Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity. Social Media+ Society, 2(2),
Bucher, T. (2018). If...then: Algorithmic power and politics. Oxford University Press.
Cheney-Lippold, J. (2017). We Are Data: Algorithms and The Making of Our Digital
Selves. New York University Press.
Duffy, B. E. (2017). (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and
Aspirational work. Yale University Press.
Entwistle, J. (2002). The aesthetic economy: The production of value in the field of
fashion modelling. Journal of Consumer Culture, 2(3), 317–339.
Eubanks, V. (2017). Automating inequality: How high-tech tools profile, police, and
punish the poor (First Edition). St. Martin’s Press.
Gillespie, T. (2017). Algorithmically recognizable: Santorum’s Google problem, and
Google’s Santorum problem. Information, Communication & Society, 20(1),
Gray, M. L., & Suri, S. (2019). Ghost work: How to stop Silicon Valley from building a
new global underclass.
Oh, D. C., & Oh, C. (2017). Vlogging White Privilege Abroad: Eat Your Kimchi ’s Eating
and Spitting Out of the Korean Other on YouTube: Vlogging White Privilege Abroad.
Communication, Culture & Critique, 10(4), 696–711.
BEYOND THE BLACK/WHITE BINARY: “INTERRACIAL” VLOGGER
CULTURE AND PROSPECTIVE “MIXED” MICROMICROINFLUENCERS
Introduction
Contemporary marketplace contexts are inherently shaped by structural racism and
colonial legacies which propel the commodification of people, places and cultures
(Johnson et al., 2019). As it exists within a broader consumer culture which is steeped
in intersecting inequalities and oppression, influencer culture is always a site and source
of power struggles that reflect and reveal socio-political hierarchies entangled with
capitalism. Therefore, influencer culture—from viral TikTok trends to the vlogs of
YouTubers—are mediated by a market logic that, I argue, is tethered to what hooks
(1992) refers to as white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Approached from this
perspective, in this paper I analyze the content of vloggers whose self-brands stem from
their (re)presentations of being in an ‘interracial’ relationship. This analysis addresses
how whiteness functions in the construction of ‘interracial’ couple vlogger brands, in
ways linked to issues concerning gender, sexuality and parenthood. More specifically, I
study what depictions of the offspring of such vloggers and their parenting of their
children suggest about the racial dynamics of vlogger culture—especially the appeal of
‘micromicroinfluencers’ (Abidin, 2015; 2017).
Methodology
Using critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA), which is a ‘multimodal analytic
technique for the investigation of Internet and digital phenomena, artifacts, and culture’
(Brock, 2018: 1012), I interpretively analyze the content of 20 high-profile ‘interracial’
couple vloggers—such as Jamie and Nikki, The Rush Fam, AdannaDavid, SliceNRice
and KKandbabyJ. CTDA ‘decenters the Western deficit perspective on minority
technology use to instead prioritize the epistemological standpoint of underrepresented
groups of technology users’ (Brock, 2020: 2). Thus, such a holistic analytic approach
which involves treating ‘technology as discourse, practice, and artifact’ (ibid.) is attuned
to the agentic, strategic and creative ways that racialized people use digital media and
technology—including as vloggers.
Drawing on critical race and digital studies (Benjamin, 2019; Noble and Tynes, 2016;
Noble, 2018), Black cyberfeminism (Gray, 2015), Abidin’s (2018) research on internet
celebrity, and the work of Burgess and Green (2009) on YouTube, I analyze the vlog
content of ‘interracial’ couples that involve a Black and a white spouse, the vlog content
of ‘interracial’ couples that do not involve white people, as well as online comments
accompanying all of these vlogs. Tacking back and forth between the content of the
vloggers under review and the online comments that they yield, I examine the explicit
and implicit ways that issues regarding race and racism are made manifest in this digital
environment. Overall, I explore how depictions of, allusions to, and the visual absence
of white people and structural whiteness operate in the context of these vlogs, the
branding of ‘interracial’ couple vloggers, the online discourse that surrounds them, and,
by extension, consumer culture in general.
Findings
Eschewing dualistic binaries of Blackness and whiteness, I study how a range of racial
identities, as well as related experiences of coupledom, parenthood and childhood, are
portrayed in the content of ‘interracial’ couple vloggers and the digital discourse that
they are located within. In doing so, I account for how gender norms and
heteronormative ideals play out in these vlogs in ways inextricably linked to race and a
market logic underpinned by demand for palatable depictions of so-called ‘diversity’. I
explicate the potential marketability of such couples’ ‘mixed-race’ and often light-
skinned children, including what connected vlog activity illustrates in relation to the
(inter)racial dynamics of vlogger culture and ‘micromicrocelebrity’ (Abidin, 2015).
My paper accounts for the omnipresent nature of a structurally white gaze in many
facets of influencer culture, by considering how some ‘interracial’ couple vloggers
leverage their proximity to whiteness and gear their content towards a so-called ‘post-
racial’ audience—in ways that are demonstrative of white supremacist capitalist
patriarchy. This work offers a contribution to studies of vlogger and influencer culture by
articulating and unpacking often unacknowledged racial dynamics, and elucidating how
aspects of ‘micromicrocelebrity; (Abidin, 2015) are moulded by a market appeal
associated with racial ‘mixedness’.
References
Abidin, C. (2015). ‘Microcelebrity: Branding babies on the Internet’ M/C Journal 18(5).
Retrieved from http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/1022
Abidin, C. (2017). ‘#familygoals: Family influencers, calibrated amateurism, and
justifying young digital labor’. Social Media + Society, 3(2), 1–15.
Abidin, C. (2018). Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. Bingley: Emerald.
Benjamin, R. (2019). Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Brock, A. (2018) ‘Critical technocultural discourse analysis’. New Media & Society,
20(3), 1012–1030.
Brock, A. (2020) Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures. New York:
New York University.
Burgess, J. and Green, J. (2009). YouTube: Online Video and Participatory Culture.
Cambridge: Polity Press.
Gray, Kishonna L. (2015). ‘Race, gender, and virtual inequality: Exploring the liberatory
potential of Black cyberfeminist theory.’ In Rebecca Lind (ed.) Produsing Theory
in a Digital World 2.0: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary
Theory, pp. 175–190. New York: Peter Lang.
hooks, bell. (1996). Reel to Real: Race, Sex and a Class at the Movies. New York:
Routledge.
Johnson, G.D., Thomas, K.D., Harrison, A.K. and Grier, S.A. (2019). Race in the
Marketplace: Crossing Critical Boundaries. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan.
Noble, S.U. and Tynes, B.M. (eds.) (2016). The Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex,
Class, and Culture Online. New York: Peter Lang.
Noble, S.U. (2018). Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism.
New York: New York University Press.
‘YOU DON’T DRESS LIKE A MUM!’ INSTAGRAM ‘STYLE MUMS’
CHALLENGING THE FASHIONABLE IDEAL
This paper examines Instagram style mums in the UK and moms in the US (for the sake
of stylistic brevity, we refer to our sample as ‘mums’ throughout) and how they articulate
their desire to be identified both as a mum and ‘fashionable’ self. Outside the fashion
elite’s control, how do these style mums perform fashion/style and what space is
opened up for alternatives to the fashionable ideal? These mums’ ‘authenticity’
challenges the ‘homogenizing logic’ (Findlay et al., 2019: 24) of the fashion image,
displaying a more inclusive fashionable aesthetic on Instagram. With a critical
awareness of the limits of the platform, our visual and textual analysis revealed clear
attempts to carve out new spaces in fashion for ‘mums’ amidst latent forces pulling for
marketable behaviors.
Context
The social media literature has yet to examine the Instagram style mum. Work on
‘mumpreneurs’ (Ekinsmyth, 2013; 2014; Eikhof, 2013; Orgad, 2019) tends to treat
fashion as a background issue. The Media and Communication analyses have noted
the presence of mums on Instagram, but their primary focus is young women using
these platforms for entrepreneurial gain as ‘lifestyle influencers’ and ‘microcelebrities’
(Abidin, 2016; Marwick, 2013; Senft, 2008) within the rise of ‘Instafame’ (Marwick, 2013)
and ‘entrepreneurial self-branding’ (Duffy and Hund, 2015) and ‘aspirational labor’
(Duffy 2017). Fashion Studies’ exclusive focus on celebrity ‘influencers’ has not
surprisingly found Instagram colonised by big brands and aesthetics very similar to
mainstream fashion (Findlay et al., 2019).
Methodology
For our analysis, we chose ‘ordinary’ Instagrammers who identify as ‘mum,’ and pair it
with ‘style’ or ‘fashion,’ i.e., model outfits and display their bodies on a regular basis, to
see how their displays potentially challenge the fashionable ideal. Searching mama
style, mum or mom style, style mum or mom, fashion mom, fashion mama, we found
accounts which feature mum/mom, and/or fashion or style as part of their moniker - for
example, @astylemum or @fashionmumof40. All feature motherhood and fashion as
part of their ‘feed.’
To capture a wider range of Instagrammers than just celebrities, our protocol sampled
24 UK and US mums using Launchmetrics’ categorisation of four ‘tiers’ of ‘influencers,’
from ‘celebrity’ (over 1.5 million); ‘mega’ (between 501k-1.5million); ‘macro’ (between
101-500k); to ‘micro’ (between 10-100k). For the mums with under 10K followers we
added a fifth tier, ‘nano’ influencer, which allowed us to observe demographics and
aesthetic sensibilities different from the mainstream. We chose Instagram because
“recent industry reports suggest that 93% of influencer campaigns include Instagram,
about twice as many as YouTube or Facebook,” (Williams, 2018, as quoted in Omeara,
2019:3). Our sample is diverse in terms of age, race, body size (compared to ‘normal’
fashionable instagrammers): all are over 30, some are in their 40s, and 10 are non-
white.
Theoretical Framework
We analyzed our data through several lenses. To track patterns of taste inside the
industry which reproduce the (fashionable) habitus, we use Bourdieu’s (1984; 1993)
field analysis, layered with practice theory, which enables analysis of how aesthetics are
maintained through working practices and institutional structures (i.e., histories of sizing
and modelling norms) (Volonte, 2019). The emerging literature on ‘platformatization’
(Gillespie 2010; 2017; Duffy et al., 2019) is utilized to see how “platform” enables
providers to appear neutral and apolitical, hiding the fallibly human labour shaping the
algorithm behind the scenes.
Findings
The very juxtaposition of ‘mum’ or ‘mom’ with ‘fashionability’ or ‘style’ implicitly
challenges ideals within fashion through an ongoing ‘identity performance’ (Rocamora
2011:411) foregrounding the complex and contradictory articulation between
‘motherhood’ and ‘fashion.’ Pushing the limits of fashion ideals, self-termed “style
mums” often showcase older, curvier bodies, transformed by motherhood. For example,
@motherofdaughters Clemmie Hopper noted, “When I tell people I’m a mum of 4 their
usual reaction is ‘you don’t look like a mum and you don’t dress like one either!’ What
does a mum even look and dress like? …Motherhood shouldn’t define you…” (11
December 2017). Similarly, @mothering.it states, “I feel so nervous about posting this
bikini snap; I’m 5 months postpartum with my fourth child and this holiday I was no way
“bikini ready”’ (4 May 2019).
Style mums also articulate motherhood through style by narrating their identities as
mums through techniques of ‘mum style.’ These ‘techniques’ offer commentaries on
motherhood not afforded in fashion media, giving voice to mums traditionally not seen in
fashion editorials (older, larger, black, or indeed all three). Mixed race UK mum Natalie
@stylemesunday clearly challenges the fashion and beauty industries, through seeking
to ‘normalise cellulite and stretch marks, different body types and different abilities.’
These ‘techniques’ of mum style engage in practices anathema to fashion – highlighting
bargain shopping, a mum ‘uniform’, and unpolished images of their daily lives: ‘Standard
mum uniform today. These Mom jeans are SO comfortable! They’re from good old
@primark’ (@thriftyyorkshiremum 11 February 2019). Many or our mums pose against
the backdrop of ordinary domestic life, kitchens with messy work surfaces, or bedrooms
with washing in the background. Throughout, we found a careful balancing act between
projecting a quasi-glamourous life and ‘authentic’ depictions of motherhood.
While the fashionable ideal was both challenged and reproduced through photographic
conventions and practices specific to ‘mum style,’ notions of ‘authenticity’ competed with
the pull towards commercialization, similar to findings in the social media literature. The
paradoxical nature of ‘mum’ and style, however, positioned our respondents in ways
that allowed for clear provocations to the fashion’s ‘homogenizing logic,’ which merit
further research.
References:
Abidin, C. 2016 “Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers’ fashion brands and #OOTD
advertorial campaigns on Instagram” Media International Australia, 161(1), 86–100.
Bourdieu, P. (1984) Distinction, New Jersey:Routledge.
Duffy, B.E. (2017) (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love. New Haven: Yale University
Press.
Duffy, B. E., & Hund, E. (2015). ‘“Having it all” on social media: Entrepreneurial
femininity and self-branding among fashion bloggers.’ Social Media + Society, 1(2), 1–
11.
Duffy, B.E., et al. (2019) “Platform Practices in the Cultural Industries,” Social Media +
Society, Oct-Dec: 1–8.
Eikhof, D.R., Carter, S., and Summers, J. (2013) ‘“Women doing their own thing”’
International Journal of Entrepreneurship, 19(5), 547 - 564.
Ekinsmyth, C. (2014) ‘Mothers’ business, work/life and the politics of
“mumpreneurship.”’ Gender, Place & Culture, 21(10), 1230-1248.
Ekinsmyth, C. (2013) Managing the business of everyday life: the roles of space and
place in ‘mumpreneurship’. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behaviour, 19(5).
Findlay, R. and de Perthuis, K. (2019) “How Fashion Travels: The Fashionable Ideal in
the Age of Instagram,” Fashion Theory, 23(2), 1-24.
Gillespie, T. (2010). The politics of ‘platforms.’ New Media & Society, 12(3), 347–364.
Gillespie, T. (2017) “The platform metaphor, revisited”
http://culturedigitally.org/2017/08/platform-metaphor/ [accessed 2/18/20].
Marwick, A.E. (2013). Status Update. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Omeara, V. (2019) ‘Weapons of the Chic,’ Social Media + Society, Oct-Dec. 2019: 1–
11.
Orgad, S. (2019) Heading Home, New York: Columbia University Press.
Rocamora, A. (2011) “Personal Fashion Blogs,” Fashion Theory, 15(4), 407-24.
Senft, T. (2008) Camgirls. New York: Peter Lang.
Volonté, P. (2019). ‘The thin ideal and the practice of fashion.’ Journal of Consumer
Culture, 19(2), 252–270.
ED-FLUENCERS: SUBJECTIVITIES OF LEARNING AND LABOR IN
SOCIAL MEDIA TRAINING PROGRAMS
Introduction
In early 2020, Jake Paul—the buzzy American YouTuber known for his frat boy antics
and patently offensive humor—announced the launch of the “Financial Freedom
Movement,” a $19.99/month educational platform targeting social media star wannabes
(Leskin, 2020). Paul’s pitch to young digital aspirants, namely that they could learn to be
“financially free from the 'societal cookie cutter life' 9-5 jobs we are all told to have,"
invoked the well-worn narrative of entrepreneurial meritocracy—one that, crucially,
elides the patterned inequalities that structure success in the social media and
technology industries `(Marwick, 2013; Noble and Roberts, 2019). Perhaps not
surprisingly, analysts dismissed Paul’s pseudo-instructional initiative as a scam; it was,
after all, not the first time Paul tried to make inroads into content creator training
(Leskin, 2020). Others, meanwhile, called attention to Paul’s unabashedly anti-
education tack (Yap, 2020). Such critiques notwithstanding, we contend that such
“edfluencer” programs (the name of Paul’s initial training course) index a confluence of
factors in social media, education, and employability that deserves further critical
attention.
Indeed, a staggering number of influencer/creator training initiatives have been
launched in recent years, ranging in scope from creator-run programs like Paul’s to
international franchises like Social Star Creator Camp to annual conferences like Ignite
Influencer Marketing Bootcamp and VidCon. Similarly, higher education institutions
across the world have started offering potential graduates courses on various aspects of
digital marketing. The curricula have a kaleidoscopic range of course
offerings: “Influencer Marketing,” “Image Consulting,” “E-commerce,” “Fashion Trends,”
and “Algorithms and Analytics,” among others. The popularity of these programs can
be understood against the backdrop of wider popular culture’s tendency to fetishize
social media careers (Duffy & Wissinger, 2017) as well as persistent debates about the
marketisation of higher education.
Together, these orchestrated activities work as resources through which forms of
knowledge and expertise are commercialized and exchanged in order to create
reputation across digital platforms. At the same time, institutionalized forms of
knowledge and expertise around careers, creative expression, and celebrity produce
subjectivities of learning and labor. More broadly, these ideals participate in the
production and reproduction of the figure of the ideal worker of neoliberalism.
Whilst much attention has been paid to labour (including digital labour) in the creative
industries, the issue of the ways labour is shaped and defined by education has been
somewhat overlooked. The present paper attends to this gap in the literature on creative
industries and digital labour by examining the cultural, economic, and political
dimensions of influencer educational programs.
Given the cultural embeddedness of educational debates in particular geographic
contexts as well as the global-local nexus of influencer labor, we focus on three social
media educational markets: the United Kingdom, Chile, and the U.S.
We do this by analyzing a group of institutions that sell influencer marketing courses,
asking questions such as: how do different countries embrace influencer marketing and
the skills required to achieve it? What are the ideological contexts that configure this
industry of knowledge? Who do these programs say about digital labour and the role
and values of education in the formation of future workers? By deploying a critical lens,
we are especially attentive to questions about idealized worker subjectivities in terms of
gender, race, class, age, and ethnicity.
Methodology
Our in-progress study draws upon a qualitative textual analysis of course websites
promoting influencer/creator education programs across Chile, the United Kingdom, and
the U.S. We analyzed 9 courses per country, using a strategically selected distribution
of 3 university courses, 3 private (non)-university courses, and 3 online courses (n=27).
We identified those courses combining online research, using keywords like “social
media courses,” “influencer courses,” “digital marketing courses,” and “social media and
content creation” for each country. The unit of analysis was the content of each course’s
website, including but not limited to its general description, the content of each course,
and the expected results and benefits communicated to prospective students. The
qualitative coding schema was guided by the preliminary observation of the data where
different categories of analysis emerged. We used a grounded theory approach by
combining data collection and analysis (Glasser & Strauss 1967) in order to refine the
concepts and categorical themes presented in the analysis. We supplement this with
data from in-depth interviews with both aspiring influencers and influencer marketing
managers.
Summary of Findings
Thus far, our analysis of data has yielded the following preliminary themes:
1) Technology--specifically social media platforms-- and the values and/or meanings
given to technical skills versus knowledge of the cultural and aesthetics of particular
sites.
2) Knowledge, or the way each course frames the value of learning and then
encourages the application. Often, the courses encouraged a sort of continued upkeep
of platform knowledge while reaffirming the value of less evergreen ideals (i.e., creating
“valuable content.”)
3) Labour, or what kind of work is represented by a content creator, and the abilities
required to do it properly. While some courses cast courses as a way to learn
“competences for the production and management of digital communication projects,”
others emphasized less tangible modes of work (such as building relationship).
4) Expertise, or what kind of values and meanings are attributed to being qualified or
certified on a set of abilities by an institution. Here we pay particular attention to the
types of laboring subjectivies who get cast as “experts,” particularly those that
reproduce inequalities (Bishop, 2020).
By exploring these themes in particular cultural-geographic configurations, we address
how influencer labour is defined and represented as well as the kind of self that is
imagined and promoted in educational discourses.
References
Bishop, S. (2020). Algorithmic experts: Selling algorithmic lore on Youtube. Social
Media+ Society, 6(1), 2056305119897323.
Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019). Social Media Entertainment: The New
Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York: New York University Press.
Duffy, B. E., & Wissinger, E. (2017). Mythologies of creative work in the social media
age: Fun, free, and “just being me”. International Journal of Communication, 11, 20, 1-
11.
Glaser, B., & Strauss, A. (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for
qualitative research.
Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status update: Celebrity, publicity, and branding in the social
media age. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
Noble, S., & Roberts, S. (2019). Technological Elites, the Meritocracy, and Postracial
Myths in Silicon Valley.
Leskin, (2020, February). P. YouTuber Jake Paul is trying to cash in on teaching fans
how to become influencers — two years after his first project failed. Business Insider.
Retrieved from: https://www.businessinsider.com/jake-paul-financial-freedom-
movement-influencer-school-edfluence-team-1000-2020-2
Yap, A. C. (2020, February 15). YouTuber Jake Paul Launches Entrepreneur How-To
Platform, Financial Freedom Movement. Variety. Retrieved from:
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/youtube-jake-paul-launches-financial-freedom-
movement-1203505286/
ARE YOU ADVERTISER AND FAMILY FRIENDLY? PRODUCTIVE
AMBIVALENCE, ECONOMIES OF VISIBILITY AND THE POLITICAL
POTENTIAL OF FEMINIST YOUTUBERS
Introduction
Of all the social media platforms that have garnered attention in the past decade for the
promises of widespread access for ordinary individuals, perhaps none has achieved the
kind of visibility as YouTube. As the second most popular website in the world,
preceded only by its parent company Google, YouTube has accumulated over 1.9
billion logged-in users each month, 500 hours of content uploaded every minute, and
over 1 billion hours of content watched daily (YouTube 2019). Here, entrepreneurial
content creators are harnessing the platform to build their own brands within the
emerging social media entertainment industry, or SME (Cunningham and Craig 2019).
Feminist content is a well-established genre on YouTube, in which creators post political
and social commentary on topics such as intersectionality, politics, gender and sexual
identity alongside comedic, lifestyle, and personality-driven fare.
While looking to advance feminist cultural agendas, these creators are situated within
an economy of visibility (Banet-Weiser 2018), incentivized to adopt certain norms and
trends if they wish to garner likes, views and subscribers. These creators exist within
the cultural context of popular feminism. Popular feminism is part of a larger context of
what Catherine Rottenberg has called “neoliberal feminism,” where corporate- and
media-friendly feminist expressions achieve a heightened visibility, and expressions that
critique patriarchal structure and systems of racism and violence are often obscured
(Banet-Weiser 2018; Bishop 2018; Rottenberg, 2014; McRobbie, 2009). In other words,
many of these creators both advance and profit from popular feminism: brand-safe
feminist discourses that dovetail comfortably with neoliberal agendas. Seeing and
hearing a safely affirmative feminism, in spectacularly visible ways often eclipses a
feminist critique of structure; the visibility of popular feminism on YouTube is important
but it often stops there, as visibility. That said, the platform has also provided a cultural
space for more marginal groups and radical left-wing politics to flourish; the visibility of
diverse, LGBTQ and gender-fluid identities on YouTube far outstrips its broadcast
media counterparts.
In this paper, we aim to complicate the dominance of popular feminism online by asking:
to what extent are professional YouTube content creators able to present more radical
versions of feminism, or else pushed to fit into neoliberal brand culture in order to gain
visibility and income? As with every development of a new technology, a utopic/dystopic
discourse frames YouTube’s creation and reception and, we argue, as many have
about emerging media technologies, this framing does not help push us forward to a
more nuanced analysis of the cultural impact of YouTube. Here, we attempt such a
nuanced analysis by positioning feminist YouTube content within what Burgess and
Green (2018) have called a ‘cultural system’, one that both provides openings and
foreclosures for specific kinds of cultural and political participation. Specifically, we
theoretically frame our analysis within the popular feminist economies of visibility and,
following feminist theorists Clare Hemmings and Lauren Berlant, an interrelated
theoretical analytic of productive ambivalence, to analyse content creators in a cultural,
economic and social context of popular feminism. We see this kind of political
ambivalence in a battle with what Banet-Weiser has called an economy of visibility.
Economies of visibility describe the ways in which visibility of particular identities and
politics, such as gender, race and sexuality, circulate on multiple media platforms. While
this visibility is important for public awareness, it also potentially becomes an end in
itself, where “visibility is all there is” (Banet-Weiser, 2018).
Methodology
As an offshoot of a broader 4-year ethnographic project looking at the lived experiences
and labour of YouTube content creators, we identified 40 prominent feminist content
creators, ranging from ‘brand-safe’ and heteronormative on the one hand to more queer
and radical on the other. We then carried out content analysis of their videos as well as
participant observation of these creators across platforms (including YouTube, Twitter,
Instagram and Patreon), paying attention to their cultural positionality, content
style/topics, income streams and modes of address to their audiences.
Findings
While recognizing that there are blurred boundaries between political ambivalence and
economies of visibility, we nonetheless analyse feminist YouTubers within this typology,
finding that while there are some similar messages across different feminist YouTube
channels, there are also those that are seeking increased recognition and visibility
within a capitalist framework, and some who are better characterized as politically
ambivalent, more complex and contradictory. Only certain feminist expressions and
politics on YouTube easily merge with market logics, whilst other more marginal
identities face additional obstacles. Nowhere is this marginalization made clearer than in
the ongoing struggles that LGBTQ+ YouTube creators have had with their content being
demonetised and age restricted due to not being “advertiser and family friendly”. We
tease out the tensions, identifications and disidentifications within the analytics of
political ambivalence and economies of visibility by investigating some popular
contemporary feminist creators on YouTube (Ash Hardell Melanie Murphy, ContraPoints
and Kat Blaque) as they navigate two intersecting approaches to feminist content
creation: 1) transactional: working within a popular feminist economy of visibility
concurrent with capitalist logics, and 2) transformational: the ambivalent process of
attaining visibility within YouTube’s attention economy as a route to radical social
change.
The work of feminist content creators on YouTube is complex and we resist a reductive
explanatory frame here. Our point in analysing these videos as transactional or
transformational is not to say that there are defined borders that separate these two
aspirations, but rather to say that it makes more sense to think about the feminist
politics of YouTube creators within a framework of political ambivalence. YouTube has
been celebrated by many as a platform that has enabled far more diverse screen
representations of race, gender and sexuality than television and film media, as is
undoubtedly the case. However, feminist YouTube creators have to navigate what are
often contradictory pressures in order to gain visibility and earn a living, such as
appealing to commercial brands whilst simultaneously maintaining authenticity and
relatability with their audiences. Rather than insist that feminist content creators are
either enabling or inhibiting feminist politics, or rather than insist on the certainty of
feminist politics on YouTube, we follow Hemmings in her resistance to the notion that
such politics can be completely “knowable.”
References
Banet-Weiser, S. (2018). Empowered: Popular Feminism and Popular Misogyny.
Durham, USA: Duke University Press.
Bishop, S. (2018). ‘Anxiety, panic and self-optimisation: Inequalities and the YouTube
algorithm’. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media
Technologies. 24:1, pp. 69-84.
Burgess, J. and Green, J. (2018). YouTube: Online video and participatory culture.
Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Cunningham, S. and Craig, D. (2019). Social Media Entertainment: The New
Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. New York: New York University Press.
Hemmings, C. (2018). Considering Emma Goldman: Feminist political ambivalence and
the imaginative archive. London, UK: Duke University Press.
McRobbie, A. (2016). Be creative: making a living in the new culture industries.
Cambridge,
UK: Polity.
Rottenberg, C. (2018). The Rise of Neoliberal Feminism. New York, USA: Oxford
University Press.
YouTube. (2019). ‘YouTube for Press’ [online]. YouTube website, 13th August.
Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/intl/en-GB/yt/about/press/
