Influencer Creep

Link: https://reallifemag.com/influencer-creep/

Intro

Today, the influencer has almost evolved into a proper job. Later, it may become a cultural norm that many roles will need to adapt.

In this article, the author pointed out a trend that influencer culture has crept into many other professions: journalism, academia, medicine, finance, and of course, art. What would be the consequences?

Highlights

The job of influencer, in other words, involves learning how to constantly accommodate oneself to the means of establishing and maintaining visibility.

That work, in turn, could be broken down into three core pillars: consistent self-branding (defined by sociologist Alison Hearn as “self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self); self-optimization for platforms (organizing one’s content to be recognizable by algorithmic systems); and commitment to selling authenticity (that is, doing all of the above while remaining “relatable” and “real”).

Workers must play to audiences, clients, bosses and platforms all at the same time, with no guarantee that any of it will pay off.

Influencer creep has a particular impact on artists, who in some respects resemble influencers: They both try to make a living by translating their aesthetic sensibility for audiences

Artists who rely on platforms now must be aware of the same things and divide their time between making pieces and managing their social media visibility.

Many of the artists I spoke to confirmed this, detailing how they optimized many different elements of their practice to be visible on Instagram,

Another artist told me that she had moved toward portraiture in place of landscapes purely because Instagram appears more likely to promote images with faces

Presenting “artist” as a lifestyle tends to do better on social media than artworks themselves, so artists experience pressure to present themselves as their content.

As one maker stated, “You have to sell your world.” To build a seductive narrative around her art, one artist crafted her small flat into an enviable Instagram backdrop for staging “shelfies” and “mantelscaping.”

BTW, mantelscaping means decorating your fireplace with nice homewares.

If the process isn’t relatable or photogenic, it might not be worth an artist’s time. And as their “backstage” content is up for scrutiny, it isn’t really a backstage at all.

Walmart has opened their “spotlight” employee influencer program, in which a select group are compensated for producing Walmart “behind-the-scenes” content, including a cross-country “Walmart dance party.”

But in the platform era, social media have become not just a leisure activity but an outsourced layer of management, an ever-present filter selecting for who is most likely to be successful and ensure that they take personal responsibility for “optimizing” how they do it.

When the influencer creep is complete, every moment will have to speak to loving one’s job, as if no other sort of experience or emotion were possible.

Closing Comments

• Social media platforms are so powerful that they could bend many people's career paths just by promoting certain types of content.
• Influencers set a new expectations for certain workers. But what influencers post online isn't necessarily real. Or maybe people don't really care about that.
• Maybe this means there will be more jobs overlapping with the entertainment business.