Currently reading: “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” Hund (2023)

I found the book “The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.” by Hund (2023) in something I read recently, and somehow the title spoke to me. Despite having been a fan for a long time (and blogging quite a bit about research on, and practice of using, social media), I’ve been using social media less and less recently, mostly because it feels like I have become too much of a product to be sold and bought without my knowledge, let alone permission. What do I give my time, my attention, to? What do I consume, but also where do I share what I create, with what consequences? If I put my content on social media, in the best case (where someone is even seeing it, but who knows what algorithms are going to do) that leads to other people spending more time there, feeding the big companies. That said, there are definitely some “influencer”-type content creators who I enjoy following, and that I enjoy coming back to to see what they are up to. I know that what they show is curated. But then so is good comedy or theatre… Anyway, I was very intrigued by the book, and below is my summary.

The book tells the story of the historical development of influencing, bringing together lots of quotes from influencers interviewed over the last two decades and putting them in the context of the technical, cultural, political developments. I never really thought about how influencing developed over time, but of course, influencers are a fairly recent phenomenon, because influencing in that sense only became possible when people had the means to make themselves visible on a large scale. Before influencers, there were celebrities (well-known mostly for their well-known-ness), but they depended on the media publishing about them. Influencers, on the other hand, are seeking, creating, strategically using visibility for themselves without relying on the press. And that only happened with the arrival of the web 2.o.

The web 2.0 of course offered many opportunities. Blogging was a new, cheap and fast way of self-publishing when never before it had been so easy (or even possible) to make content available for people all around the world. For many people, simply being online led to a new awareness of the public persona or brand that they wanted to portrait.

And then, a “perfect storm” happened, where so many factors came together: Technology became available (for example the platforms blogger and wordpress, then twitter, Facebook, etc), culture shifted (towards the individualisation of work, so self-branding seemed like one way of securing future income; at the same time distrust in institutions caused by scandals etc grew), economy changed (due to the financial crisis, people started using social media to market themselves to find jobs) and industrial factors (even for established publishers, there was a move from print to online, from mass distribution to targeted advertisement, to sponsored content as new form of word-of-mouth marketing, to affiliate marketing, …). While working in the digital economy seemed liberating or at least opening doors, there were definite problems with it: individuals need to self-promote and work practically non-stop, while carrying all risks themselves. Work is also not happening in direct exchange for money, but always in hopes of future returns. And inequalities of gender, race, class persist. It is noteworthy that the influencer industry is mostly young, blond women, driving consumption that is seen as mostly feminine. So is it empowering and enjoyable, or exploitative?

Influencers are attempting to show their “authentic” selves, but of course any presentation of oneself is curated (and some people present alternative identities for some form of gain in money or ego). Influencers need to choose and present facets of themselves that they want to include in a coherent and recognisable brand, and to be consistent in how often and what they publish. But still, both influencers and those being influenced, want to believe in the genuine authenticity of the influencers, not in some elaborate ploy to trick us out of our money. And that is also how influencers mostly see themselves: “bloggers see themselves as truth tellers in a world where the truth is hard to come by.”

And at the same time that influencers value personal relationships with followers, influencers are also very aware of who their audience is beyond personal connections, and using demographic data provided by the platforms, adjust their content and brand accordingly. This is data that was just never available before social media, so of course there is an adjustment period of figuring out what can be done with it, and what maybe shouldn’t be done. One interesting titbit that I had never considered is that the Likert scale (the “on a scale from 1 to 5, do you fully disagree, disagree, are neutral, agree, or fully agree” type scale that we now use all the time in SoTL projects or just random questionnaires) was only invented less than 100 years ago! Before, there was no quantification of people’s strengths of feelings towards statements. But now it is suddenly so easy to know so much about people through audience surveys!

And with developments in the tools, there are also different ways to monetise engagement, both directly through affiliate links, and indirectly through banner advertising on blogs or sponsored content. But this puts influencers in a position where they feel they have to choose between doing what they initially came for, i.e. creating for the fun of it and being true to themselves by representing themselves truthfully and creating content that is meaningful to themselves, and “selling out”. It’s a difficult balance, and being authentic is not the same as being accurate, but it is necessarily a curated reality. And the understanding that self-identifying as a brand and using that to monetising that as “authenticity” became more and more accepted.

When smartphones became popular, with them came apps like Instagram which opened up a whole new world of easy online presence for the masses, and a gold rush of “aspirational labor” with just the hope of making money, but brand deals etc came without transparent selection criteria or pricing structures, leading to exploitation of many small influencers. For brands to work with them, they need to be on-brand for whoever they work with, and make sense in that company’s feed. They needed to be themselves, but at the same time predictable and polished. Organic but strategic. Real, but not too real.

While in the beginning, influencers were mostly focussed on fashion, at some point people started to branch out into “lifestyle”, meaning that they could work with all kinds of brands for different aspects of their life, so in addition to clothes and makeup, now they could also be engaged with food or car rentals or holiday destinations. And suddenly there were brand events focussed on their social media appearance everywhere, planned down to the tiniest detail as photo opportunities — from photo backdrops to instagrammable napkins. And even artificial influencers and exploited influencer kids became hugely popular. But with everything being monetisable came a wave of self-commercialisation, but also a wave of homogeneity shaped by what seemed to work best (this is also when feed planners were born, to create a coherent aesthetic. I love those! Or I did until Instagram moved away from squares and my carefully curated feed suddenly looked super weird…). And suddenly buying fake followers was a thing to drive the metrics to appear like a good partner for brands. But that only worked for a short while, until other engagement metrics started being used, like clicks, likes, reposts, or comments. But engagement did not only depend on how good content was or how well it was tailored for a specific audience, but whether algorithms showed it to the target audience at all. So at some point, people started realising that they depended on unpredictable algorithms and management decisions of Instagram and others.

With the pandemic in 2020, there was a big increase in social media use — people had more time, but also a lot more fears and desire for information. Now influencing became relevant not just for what to buy, but even for and especially against masking in public, vaccines, and other real-life relevant stuff. Which, for many, made influencing even harder work, since now they had to position themselves, felt like they needed to respond to conspiracy theories etc.. Some pivoted to become “genuinfluencers” who chose “lessons over likes”, some started sharing more of the “behind the scenes”, for example screenshots of hateful DMs. At the same time, communication had become so easy, and sharing had become so easy, that anyone can participate in spreading information and mis-information over the whole world. And, as Hund writes, “the slope between harmless and harmful is slippery“. When advertising for clothes is ok, and telling people to go vote is still ok, are political messages still ok? Even when they are paid? When you are a microinfluencer and therefore don’t have a huuuuge reach, but on the other hand it is so cheap to buy so many microinfluencers? “There are few safeguards in place to prevent it, just individuals and companies patching their immediate domains. All of this is happening right­ under our noses, on the primary platforms for digital sociality, self-expression, and information sharing. The industry and the public would be right to won­der: Who is ­ really in charge? Do we consent to this?”

Somewhere through these developments, there has been a shift of power from the individual with their little blog who tried to make a better living for themselves, to the big companies like Meta, which depend on influencers, but on the flip side do not disclose and seemingly randomly change their algorithms that influencers reach depends on. But there is no unionisation or other professional organisation of influencers as of yet, and also no accountability, for example for the environmental and social impacts of overconsumption, or the mental health impacts, in part driven through influencers. And also non-professional users need to recognise that what they are doing by using social media is generating profit for big companies. “There is enough evidence of patterned be­haviors and outcomes for us to acknowledge both the benefits (typically individual) and the damages (often societal) that have come with the influencer industry developing in the way that it has—­ and to know that interventions to ­ these issues must happen at ­every level at which they exist, including the individual, industrial, and regulatory. ­ These interventions are cumulative; a fix in one area ­will likely benefit another.”

One paragraph that really touched me is this: “Settled in Los Angeles during their exile from Nazi Germany, cultural theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer wrote of the “culture industry”—namely the advertising, radio, and film industries of the era—­ that kept the common worker in line, providing narratives that reinforced a life rhythm of working so hard that reliance on “mindless entertainment” became a necessity to unwind and then return to work, leaving ­ little opportunity for workers to reflect on their circumstances or resist them.” Is this what social media is doing to us? Are we using the “mindless entertainment” to avoid thinking about what we should be doing to make the world a better place, and getting into action? What is it really that we spend our time and attention on, and why? The business model is clearly to keep people in the apps for as long as possible. Hund writes “my hope is for ­people to cultivate, as best they can, a mindset of distance and utility—to make our use of social media intentional, however serious or silly the intention may be“. And in light of algorithms being tweaked to feed the addiction, to manipulate people, to win elections, this hope is now more relevant than ever.

In other news: Today’s cold dip felt almost like summer already!

Emily Hund (2023). The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media. Princeton University Press.