Influencer Creep
How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture
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- $20.99
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- $20.99
Publisher Description
A look at how the rise of influencer culture has changed creative work
A sculptor works while wearing a GoPro camera to capture Instagram content. A painter decides whether to make pieces that she won't be able to share on Instagram, after her account was blocked for sharing "sexualized" content. An artist finds that her portraits of light-skinned women get an algorithmic boost over those featuring dark-skinned models. These creative workers are now using the content-generation skills and promotional strategies pioneered by influencers to compete for visibility online.
Influencer Creep explores what happens when creative workers must go beyond their work to build a comprehensive online presence. Creator studies expert Sophie Bishop delineates how the tactics of professional influencers affect the ways creative workers navigate social media platforms. They must optimize their content to win the favor of opaque algorithms they do not control. They must engage in relentless self-branding, creating a compelling, consistent, and platform-ready image. And that image, in spite of being carefully manufactured, must be perceived as authentic.
Taking seriously the motivations that drive more and more people into the contest for online visibility, Influencer Creep documents a creative workforce nervously conforming to the monopoly power of social media platforms—and occasionally resisting it.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this uneven debut treatise, media studies scholar Bishop analyzes how social media influencer culture impacts the art world. Artists, she asserts, have been pressured into "optimization," or the pursuit of algorithmic success. Frequently facing failure in this pursuit, artists are often simply exhorted to "make better art" that is more likely to go viral, but even this glib advice to sell out, Bishop writes, is made difficult by the lack of transparency about how algorithms function. She turns to analyzing the content of successful influencers to argue that their virality stems from their performance of "authenticity" like stumbling over a word or making a mistake. These "strategically built amateur aesthetics" evoke the "emotional vulnerability" that is currently key to achieving algorithmic optimization. Certain kinds of political and cultural production can't be made to fit into this optimized space, Bishop argues; but more art is being tailored to this aesthetic, in a process she calls "platformization." While at times illuminating, especially when it comes to the proliferation of "get rich quick" advice for artists, Bishop's argument feels somewhat oblique, fluctuating between merely comparing influencers to artists because they both use social media for self-promotion, and asserting that influencer culture is impacting the art world directly (examples include the much-maligned bloggers who swarm fashion shows). Still, those in the art world will find plenty to chew on.
