Moshimoshi folks,
My latest piece for Real Life is on Influencer culture: On how to look extremely real when you are extremely online.
Read Layers of Identity: How to be “real” when everyone is watching, as part of the week’s series on Influencers.
“for influencers to convince an audience that they are being authentic, it is not enough for them to merely show themselves without “artifice”: barefaced, with a bedhead, and in pajamas. Instead, they must actively juxtapose this stripped-down version of themselves against the median and normative self-presentations of glamour, to continually create and assign value to new markers — faults and flaws, failures and fiascos — to affirm the veracity of their truth-ness.”
“An audience is enticed into trying to evaluate and validate how genuine a persona is by following the feedback loop across the front stage of social media and the backstage of “real life,” through inconspicuous and scattered holes or gateways that were intentionally left as trails for the curious.”
/C
