When influencers call the shots

With creatively doctored content and brand collaborations, anyone can amass huge followings and enormous cultural and economic influence.
| Photo Credit: SREEJITH R. KUMAR

Over the past couple of years, influencer culture has been among the defining features of the digital age, responsible for the formation of aspirations, consumer behaviour and social norms. It is through platforms such as Instagram and YouTube that new celebrities have been able to emerge.

With creatively doctored content and brand collaborations, anyone can amass huge followings and enormous cultural and economic influence. But beneath that glossy surface lies a truly complex, and at times, unnerving landscape of the pressure to maintain relevance, authenticity, and engagement.

Understanding the dynamics of influencer culture, symbolic interactionism offers an appropriate framework. Drawing on sociologist George Herbert Mead’s work, this theory postulates that through symbolic interactions with others, human beings create and, in a way, interpret social realities. Through their content, influencers are constantly talking to their audience and trying to shape their identities and sense of self through likes, comments, shares, and brand deals. What comes out of this micro-level in interaction piles into larger trends within society, thus providing an ongoing cycle of negotiation by both the influencer and the followers regarding what meanings and values certain lifestyles, products, and behaviours hold.

Influencers function in this system as such symbols — beauty, success, and happiness. Through them, the posts, stories, and videos are vehicles of meaning for their audiences, where they project personal desires and aspirations onto contrived personas. This exerts a huge pressure on the influencers to keep up the image, since their livelihoods and social capital depend on their ability to hold up the symbolic value they represent.

Technology, or more precisely, artificial intelligence, is among the big drivers of influence culture today. It controls the visibility of content on social media through algorithms, thereby influencing who becomes a popular influencer and who goes into oblivion. Algorithms are designed to maximise engagement and often tend toward sensational or photo-worthy or emotionally charged content. As such, this continuously pressures one to come up with content that the algorithms want, probably at the cost of authenticity.

It is also influencing how brands collaborate with influencers in an age where machine learning tools can analyse huge amounts of data to identify influencers whose audience demographics reflect a brand’s target market. The data-driven approach has turned influencer marketing into a very strategic, calculated initiative where success often seems to be measured by metrics such as engagement rate, follower growth, and conversion rates. It is then that this focus on quantifiable outcomes may further increase the pressure on influencers to fit into some trends or lines of behaviour that are in demand.

This, coupled with the pressure to meet algorithmic expectations, is what investors have projected will have deep effects on the mental health of social media influencers. Burnout, anxiety, and depression are regular problems for most influencers, who feel entrapped in a cycle of producing content just to be validated. A fear of becoming irrelevant, or even losing followers, could then spiral an influencer into obsessive behaviour: religiously monitoring their analytics and tweaking their content to maintain engagement.

This phenomenon is captured sociologically by the concept of “impression management”, coined by Erving Goffman. Much like actors on a stage, influencers act in front of their audiences, explicitly managing their online personalities in such a way that exudes an ideal version of themselves. With the relentless nature of social media, however, comes the toll of having to perform continuously with little room to break or slip up in any way. The pressure to sustain the image of flawlessness may be a cause of the probable disconnection of the influencer from his or her online persona and the real-life one, breeding inauthenticity and emotional strain.

AI indirectly creates echo chambers—users are fed information that agrees or aligns with their existing beliefs and preferences through the influencing of content curation. Reaffirmation of societal pressures for conformity to ideas such as beauty standards or lifestyle choices will further trigger the influence of influencers on people and as a whole.

The dynamics of influence culture are going to change with the evolution of AI. One of the emerging technologies bound to raise new ethical questions regarding digital spaces, authenticity, and manipulation is deep fake influencers.: AI-generated personas mimicking human influencers. Such AI influencers, unshackled by the limitations of their human creators, can easily dominate social media platforms, reshaping the very concept of influence and further blurring lines between reality and virtuality. Whereas AI tools within content creation are most likely to grow in sophistication for human influencers, from automated editing and personalised recommendations to predictive analytics guiding the influencer-follower relationship, increased pressure may also be put on the standardisation of content by the algorithms, favouring certain formats or styles over others and thus reducing the diversity of voices and perspectives in the digital space. Such is influencer culture, a highly charged social phenomenon inextricably intertwined with the technologies that feed it. By means of symbolic interactionism, I have been better able to see how influencers and their audiences co-create meaning within a digitally mediated world. But with AI taking centre stage in the future of social media, this pressure to brush up the image, so as to conform to algorithmic expectations, will be ratcheted up — a very serious question begging itself about authenticity, mental health, and the future of digital culture.

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