OMGBRB blogwar: Orchestrating controversy and manufacturing disorder in commercial lifestyle blogging

Commercial lifestyle bloggers who blog for a living rely on viewer traffic on their social media platforms for advertising income. Unlike positive reputation management strategies such as fostering intimacy with readers, some bloggers have taken to orchestrating controversy in the industry in order to generate ‘hype’. This manufactures an intense sense of disorder within a very short time frame in which bloggers compete to capture the attention of curious readers, in order to create publicity for themselves and intensify exposure for their social media platforms. Using the lifestyle blogging industry in Singapore as a case study, this paper investigates bloggers’ engagements with status claims, appearance manipulation, and and ‘tell all’ exposés to disrupt the equilibrium of blog viewership and negotiate their command of the attention economy.

Abidin, C. (2014) “OMGBRB blogwar: Orchestrating controversy and manufacturing disorder in commercial lifestyle blogging” The Annual University of Sydney Anthropology Symposium, University of Sydney, Sydney. Nov 5, 2014.

Abidin, C. (2014) “OMGBRB blogwar: Orchestrating controversy and manufacturing disorder in commercial lifestyle blogging” CNM/CARE Research Talk, Communications and New Media, National University of Singapore, Singapore. Oct 1, 2014.