Please Subscribe! Influencers, Social Media, and the Commodification of Everyday Life Crystal Abidin (B.Soc.Sci.) This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of The University of Western Australia School of Social Sciences Anthropology & Sociology Media & Communication 2016 Abstract Please Subscribe! Influencers, Social Media, and the Commodification of Everyday Life This dissertation is an analysis of how some everyday Internet users shape themselves into a popular form of social media microcelebrities increasingly being labeled “Influencers”. Influencers are shapers of public opinion who persuade their audience through the conscientious calibration of personae on “digital” media such as social media, supported by “physical” space interactions with their followers in the flesh to sustain their accessibility, authenticity, believability, emulatability, and intimacy. Emically, these five qualities are encapsulated in what Influencers refer to as “relatability”, or Influencers’ ability to captivate their audience and evoke in them the desire to identify with the Influencer. I investigate Influencers in the “lifestyle” genre, in which they accumulate a following on blogs and social media through the textual and visual narration of their personal, everyday lives and proceed to capitalize on their followers by inserting advertisements for products and services through the narrative device of an “advertorial”. Coming from an anthropological perspective, I am interested in the everyday practices of Influencers and their relationships to the larger industry. While the data presented in this thesis include some participant observation and interview snippets from “management firms” and “followers”, and while I pinpoint some of the ways these Influencers have reshaped the media structures in Singapore, my primary focus is on the lived experiences of the Influencers per se rather than a more macro-mapping of this media ecology. Specifically, I analyze the process of how everyday Internet users fashion themselves into Influencers and argue that Influencers make a spectacle of the ordinary, the everyday, and the mundane through practices I analyze as organized by five key tenets: personae, femininities, taste, intimacies, and attention. More precisely, I argue that the success of an Influencer is premised on the conscientious calibration of extremes within each tenet: between the “privacy” and “publicness” with regards to personae (chapter 5); between “agency” and “vulnerability” with regards to femininities (chapter 6); between “aspiration” and “emulation” with regards to taste (chapter 7); between the “personal” and the “commercial” with regards to intimacies (chapter 8); and, finally, between the “mundane” and the “spectacular” with regards to attention (chapter 9). In other words, it is the Influencers’ savvy negotiation of strategic interaction across multiple personae that constitute their impact and longevity in the industry. Although the ethnographic research was conducted in Singapore from the early to the middle years of the second decade of the 2000s, the analytical conceptualization can be mapped onto creative industries elsewhere. Table of Contents CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION Please Subscribe!: Influencers, Followers, and the Commodification of Everyday Life__________________________________________________1 CHAPTER 2 CONTEXT You Blogger?: Contextualizing the Influencer Industry in Singapore___21 Popular discourse 23 Cultural specificities of Singapore 25 Historicizing the Influencer industry 34 Structure of the Influencer industry 43 Conclusion 50 CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGIES CyaIRL: Negotiating Digital and Physical Fieldwork_________________53 Access 58 Communicative norms 77 Transitioning from the digital to the physical 85 Ethical considerations 89 Qualitative analysis 94 Conclusion 95 CHAPTER 4 THEORETICAL INSPIRATIONS Situating Influencer Commerce__________________________________97 A brief history of (micro)celebrity 99 Blogs, social media, and commerce 113 Decorum and staging 120 Personae 123 Femininities 126 Taste 134 Intimacies 139 Attention 142 Conclusion 145 CHAPTER 5 PERSONAE I Am Me: Numbers, Persona, and Privacy_________________________147 Part I – A numbers game 150 Numbers and relationships 150 Numbers and value 161 Part II – Platform and personae congruence 165 Platform congruence 165 Personae congruence 169 Part III – Conceptualizing privacy and publicness 173 Lifecycle of commoditized privacy 177 Conclusion 182 CHAPTER 6 FEMININITIES Heyyy Dearie: Cyber-femininities, Gender Repository, and Agentic Cute________________________________________________________183 Part I – Cyber-femininities: Performing femininities in digital spaces 185 Part II – Gender repository: Visibilizing the making of ideal femininities 192 Part III – Agentic cute: Appropriating cuteness as feminine agency 209 Conclusion 223 CHAPTER 7 TASTE How To Look Expensive (but not so much): Taste Displays, Commerce Curation, and Instagram_______________________________________225 Instagram 227 Perpetual transitional mobility 228 Part I – Curating taste on Instagram 232 Part II – Knockoffs and authentic replicas: Performing taste displays at a discount 235 Part III – Calibrating taste and advertorial disclosure on Instagram 239 Influencer managers as intermediaries of taste and relatability 272 Conclusion 274 CHAPTER 8 INTIMACIES Technologies of Intimacy <333: Perceived Interconnectedness, Cyber- BFFs, and Laboring Sociality___________________________________275 Intimacy labor 276 Part I – Perceived Interconnectedness: Negotiating intimacies in the digital 281 Disclosure 281 Semiotic intimacy and value 283 From Parasocial Relations to Perceived Interconnectedness 287 Part II – Cyber-BFFs: Negotiating tensions in bridging digital and physical intimacies 290 Reacting to disorder 300 Part III – Labouring sociality: Negotiating intimacies in the physical 307 Practicing intimacy 309 Conclusion 328 CHAPTER 9 ATTENTION Attention, Please!: Influencer Wars, Shamelebrity Rituals, and Productive Disorder_____________________________________________________331 Attention events and rituals 332 Part I – Influencer wars: Disrupting competitors for self-publicity 335 Disorder and equilibrium 342 Part II – Shamelebrity rituals: Self-shaming as publicity strategy 344 Shaming practices 345 Shamelebrity 349 Shamelebrity Influencer case studies 353 Maintaining followers in tandem with shamelebrity practices 369 Limitations of commodified shaming 374 Part III – Productive disorder: Hating and web amnesia 376 Hating 378 Web amnesia 383 Conclusion 385 CHAPTER 10 CONCLUSION But Wait, There’s More!: The Expansion of Commodified Life________387 Summary 388 FAQ: Concerns and considerations 390 Recent developments in regulation and law 395 Budding developments in the Influencer industry 398 Please Subscribe! 403 Bibliography_________________________________________________407 Appendix____________________________________________________445 Appendix A: Power-coupling 445 Appendix B: Micro-microcelebrity 453 Appendix C: Newspaper reports on blogshops and Influencers between Jan 2007 and Jun 2013 461 Appendix D: Glossary 469 Appendix E: Participant Information Form (PIF) & Participant Consent Form (PCF) 475 List of Figures, Illustrations, and Tables CHAPTER 3 METHODOLOGIES Figure 3.1 84 CHAPTER 5 PERSONAE Figure 5.1 156 Figure 5.2 156 Figure 5.3 157 Figure 5.4 157 Figure 5.5 158 Figure 5.6 159 Figure 5.7 160 Figure 5.8 160 Figure 5.9 161 CHAPTER 7 TASTE Figure 7.1 241 Figure 7.2 242 Figure 7.3 243 Figure 7.4 244 Figure 7.5 245 Figure 7.6 246 Figure 7.7 247 Figure 7.8 248 Figure 7.9 248 Figure 7.10 249 Figure 7.11 250 Figure 7.12 251 Figure 7.13 252 Figure 7.14 253 Figure 7.15 253 Figure 7.16 254 Figure 7.17 255 Figure 7.18 256 Figure 7.19 257 Figure 7.20 258 Figure 7.21 259 Figure 7.22 260 Figure 7.23 261 Figure 7.24 262 Figure 7.25 262 Figure 7.26 265 Figure 7.27 267 Figure 7.28 268 Figure 7.29 269 Figure 7.30 269 Figure 7.31 270 Figure 7.32 272 CHAPTER 8 INTIMACIES Table 8.1: Parasocial Relations vs. Perceived Interconnectedness 289 CHAPTER 9 ATTENTION Figure 9.1 336 Figure 9.2 337 Figure 9.3 338 Figure 9.4 338 Figure 9.5 339 Figure 9.6 339 Figure 9.7 356 Figure 9.8 357 Figure 9.9 359 Figure 9.10 360 Figure 9.11 365 Figure 9.12 367 Acknowledgements My deepest thanks to: My supervisors Greg Acciaioli and Rob Cover – for infinite wisdom, unwavering support towards my (over-)ambitious aspirations, and digital/physical friendship. Also, for nagging me to eat veggies while feeding me cake (Greg), and for 0100hrs email correspondence reminding me to sleep (Rob). Van Ikin, Jo Elfving-Hwang, Michael Azariadis, and Krystyna Haq – for navigating bureaucratic mazes with me. Special thanks to Van and Michael for guiding me through stacks of scholarship applications over several semesters and never giving up. Loretta Baldassar, Michael Pinches, and Richard Davis – for your support at various points of my candidature. Eric Thompson, Mandakini Arora, Gabriele Marranci, and Yasser Mattar – for your absolutely wonderful undergrad classes that inspired me to pursue grad school, for supporting my grad school applications, and for our annual coffee/lunch dates. Everyone at the MMTC (esp. Mart & Barbara) and DERC (esp. Heather & Josh) – for hosting me during the completion of this thesis. The University, Convocation, School of Social Sciences, and Postgraduate Students’ Association – for funding support at various points during fieldwork and conference travels. @kellybergstrom,