Browsing Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology; Issue no. 8: Gender, Globalization and the Digital (November 2015) by Author "Abidin, Crystal"
Around the world, many young people have taken to social media to monetise their
personal lives as “influencers.” Although international news reports have variously
described these commercial social media users as “bloggers,” “YouTubers,” and
“Instagrammers,” I conceptualise these high-profile Internet microcelebrities (Senft
2008) as influencers regardless of their digital platform. Influencers are everyday,
ordinary Internet users who accumulate a relatively large following on blogs and social
media through the textual and visual narration of their personal lives and lifestyles,
engage with their following in digital and physical spaces, and monetise their following
by integrating “advertorials” into their blog or social media posts. A pastiche of
“advertisement” and “editorial”, advertorials in the Influencer industry are highly
personalised, opinion-laden promotions of products/services that influencers
personally experience and endorse for a fee.
Although influencers are now a worldwide phenomenon, this paper investigates a
subset of them, namely women influencers of the “lifestyle” genre in Singapore. Based
on my fieldwork and drawing from Horton & Wohl’s work on parasocial relations
(1956), I observe how influencers appropriate and mobilise intimacies in different ways
(commercial, interactive, reciprocal, disclosive), and describe a model of
communication between influencers and followers I term “perceived
interconnectedness”, in which influencers interact with followers to give the
impression of intimacy. The practices investigated and analyses developed in this paper
are not unique to Singapore and may be mapped onto larger Influencer ecologies.
However, as a small nation of just over five million (YourSingapore 2013) with a high IT
penetration rate (iDA 2015) and relatively developed Influencer industry[1], it is hoped
that this study of influencers in Singapore can serve as a microcosm for future
comparative studies of influencers globally
