Description
In this assignment, you will write a 500-word proposal outlining your intended final project. Please include a minimum of 3 references (including two academic texts). You should also include any relevant links, images, or context for your project idea. If there are any technical aspects of your project, make sure you are describing the process in detail. Please also get in touch early on for support.
The final assignment is to:
(a) create any of the following:
Intervention
Manifesto
Zine
Web comic
Written, spoken, video essay
Video collage
Game
Podcast
Speculative fiction
Pottery
Visual art
Etc.
(b) Write a 1000-word description of your creative project, demonstrating your understanding of the course concepts and applying it to a creative critical project.
For the Project Proposal Assignment, please be sure to include
Your topic of choice
Your format of choice, with explanation for why this format will work best
Key arguments that your creative project will make, with reference to at least three references that you are thinking with.
Timeline of production (ie: throughout November, what steps will you take each week to complete your project?)
Equipment, tools, software, etc that will be needed to complete the assignment
List of references.
Unformatted Attachment Preview
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Communicative ❤ Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness – Ada New Media
ISSUE NO. 8
Communicative ❤ Intimacies: In uencers and
Perceived Interconnectedness
Crystal Abidin
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.
Methodology
This paper is ethnographically situated. The data presented is from original fieldwork
in the Influencer industry Singapore since 2010, and contextually informed by my
personal experiences interacting with influencers and their followers since their debut
in 2005. Several collaborative methodologies were employed: 1) I conducted participant
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observation in the Influencer industry between 2011 and 2015 in various capacities
including a research scientist and shadow manager at Influencer management
agencies, and a personal assistant, copyeditor, and fashion intern to several influencers;
2) I conducted personal interviews with influencers, their management agencies, and a
small number of followers either in person or through technology such as Email,
WhatsApp, and Skype; 3) I conducted archival research into mainstream media
coverage on influencers between 2005 and 2013 at the Singapore Press Holdings
Information Resource Centre; 4) I archived influencers’ public and commercial blogs
and social media feeds through screenshots. This paper focuses on the influencers’
perspectives. Data coding was informed by grounded theory (Glaser & Strauss 1968).
Pseudonyms are adopted in this paper.
In uencers in Singapore
In Singapore, lifestyle influencers are predominantly women, are aged between 18 and
35, and use English and Singlish[2] as the primary language. Most influencers are
contracted to an Influencer management agency that publicises their portfolio to
prospective clients and brokers deals in exchange for a commission. Although a
handful of extremely prolific and viable influencers have chosen to go independent, for
most (prospective) influencers, being “picked up,” “signed,” or “contracted” is a
valuable status symbol.
Additionally, the influencers I investigate belong to the cohorts who were schooled in
the decades during which IT infrastructure and knowledge was championed by the
state (Cordeiro & Al-Hawamdeh 2001, Mahizhnan 1999, Wong 1992). These influencers
and their followers were brought up in the 1990s-2000s, during which they literally
grew up with the Internet, and generally have collectively internalised the expectant
norms and flexible posturing of various personae (Turkle 2008) necessary for
communicative intimacies.
Although microcelebrities are public icons with large-scale followings who are famous
within small, niche networks (Marwick 2013), many influencers in Singapore go on to
become multimedia microcelebrities beyond these earlier envisioned niche networks.
Beyond the web, the impact and status of influencers has been recognised in several
mainstream industries in Singapore. In order to leverage on influencers’
predominantly youth following and boost ratings, producers star influencers in highprofile cameos. Despite being thought of as an “unstable career” in the early days,
educational institutes now invite alumni who have become influencers to share
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“success stories” with their juniors. To appeal to voters who are increasingly turning to
digital media for electoral coverage, politicians are having webcast dialogue sessions
and photographed tea sessions with influencers. In addition, influencers frequently
headline mainstream newspapers and magazines for their good looks (i.e. “Model
owners”, Ng 2009), entrepreneurship (i.e. “Net Worth”, Chung 2010), and creative
methods (i.e. “From blog to riches”, Chiew 2009). As evidenced, the media space for
dialogue and visibility once controlled by executives and dominated by public figures
and mainstream celebrities are increasingly being commanded by young women
influencers who have built a strong rapport with their followers.
In uencers and followers
Influencers in Singapore refer to users who “follow” them on social media as
“followers” rather than “fans” (Marwick & boyd 2011), in rejection of the status
elevation and sense of distance this hierachical naming implies. As noted by Influencer
Bernice:
“I don’t really see them as fans, cos it sounds like I’m very big or like a celebrity… but
I’m don’t think I’m like very ‘high up’… I’m normal and just like everyone…”
Influencer Michelle similarly notes:
“I call them readers… readers and haters… not fans lah please, don’t make it sound like
I [am] very duapai [big shot].”
In addition, Influencer Linda feels that branding her followers as “fans” may come
across as demeaning:
“I think if you call them fans then they might feel like you think you are very great…
like better than them [such that] you deserve fans… but I’m not… I’m very ordinary,
and I hope I don’t give the impression that I am ‘above’ all of them.”
In their attempt to retain an impression of “intimacy” (discussed below) and to bridge
the distance between themselves and followers, influencers in Singapore tend to
emphasise a persona that is ordinary and everyday, and premise their communication
on a “responsiveness to, rather than distancing from, one’s community” (Senft
2008:116).
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Influencers in Singapore generally categorise their followers as “readers” (supportive
towards influencers), “haters” (disavow influencers and have been known to denigrate
their craft), and “bots” (dummy, purchased accounts that some influencers have been
accused of using to boost their numbers). Although a handful of influencers do refer to
some followers as “fans”, this term is the least used as it tended to imply a sense of
distance and status elevation between influencers and followers.
Although most of their followers are between the ages of 13 and 35 (70-80% women, 2030% men), influencers are fairly well-known and recognisable by the general
population as the vernacular “bloggers”. This is owing to the fact that influencers in
Singapore first debut on blogs in 2005. On a single platform, influencers in Singapore
may boast followers numbering between 7,000 and 500,000. This number increases
multifold if individual Influencer’s various social media platforms are to be
combined[3]. This following usually comprises a significant portion of regional and
international users: this is noted in the comments section of influencers’ social media
feeds in which followers based outside of Singapore mark their “exoticism” and loyalty
by mentioning the region or country from which they hail, and the duration of which
they have been “following” the Influencer”:
“Omg [name of Influencer]! I have been following you on Insta since you started! We
love you in Italy!”
“… [name of Influencer] ❤ your Indon supporter here! I [have been] read[ing] your
blog from when you were still not so famous, lol Plz follow back!…”
In addition, many comments left by international followers are in languages other than
English and Singlish (i.e. Bahasa Indonesia, Traditional Mandarin, Japanese, Korean,
Thai, and Italian). Influencers in Singapore generally identify the periods on weekday
mornings between 8 and 10 am, and on evenings between 7 and 9 pm as the prime time
for peak user traffic (Abidin 2014:125), and thus schedule crucial posts such as major
advertorials then. However, in recognition of their international following, many
influencers additionally specially publish Instagram and Twitter posts corresponding to
the peak hours of their international following in different time zones.
In uencers and commercial intimacies
Many scholars have studied intimacy enacted as business strategies, some among
women. In her work on domestic labour and migration through marriage, Constable
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(2009) has underscored instances of the commodification of intimacy within marital
relationships and the family. Hochschild’s (1983) work on staff in the service industry
has similarly disclosed the enactment of intimacy in business exchanges. Gregg (2011:3)
examines the impact of online technology on contemporary work culture in which a
“presence bleed” causes boundaries between professional and personal identities to
break down and affective labour has to be renegotiated. Marwick & boyd’s (2011) study
of celebrity practitioners on Twitter reveal that personal information is used to create a
sense of intimacy with followers. Baym’s (2012) investigation of musicians and their
social media audiences revealed that musicians saw their fans as equals and derived
genuine interpersonal rewards from the intimacies exchanged online.
Similar communicative intimacies play out among influencers and followers in
Singapore, among whom “intimacy” is emically understood as how familiar and close
followers feel to an Influencer. Although an extended discussion is beyond the scope of
this paper, I note that the “intimacy” discussed in this paper is distinct from other
related emic notions of “accessibility” (how easy it is to approach an Influencer in
digital and physical spaces), “believability” (how convincing and realistic an
Influencer’s depicted lifestyle and sentiment is), “authenticity” (how genuine an
Influencer’s actual lifestyle and sentiment is), “emulatability” (how easy it is for
followers to model themselves after an Influencer’s lifestyle). Thus, it is possible for
intimacies between influencers and followers to be motivated by commerce or
elaborately curated as long as followers (who may or may not be critically aware of
these) feel familiar, close, and emotionally attached to influencers.
The allure of influencers is premised on the ways they engage with their followers to
give the impression of exclusive, intimate exchange. Generally, influencers in the
lifestyle genre write about their lives “as lived” as the central theme of their output,
unlike influencers in other genres such as parenting, fashion, or food, who focus
exclusively on a streamlined thematic interest that does not have to intimately relate to
their personal, private lives. Like Constable (2009) focused on conjugal relationships
and domestic labour, and Hochschild (1983) customer service, influencers practice a
feminine labour[4] that hinges on commercial intimacies, albeit one that focuses on
homosocial friendships and advertorial advertising.
Influencers appear to be critically aware of the latent profit-oriented motivations
behind their interactions, but like the musicians in Baym’s (2012) study of musicians
and their social media audiences, attest to benefiting from the commercial intimacy on
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some level. Influencer Marianne, who was contemplating a “dramatic post” about her
breakup, admits that while she is enthused by the potential increase in follower traffic
from her controversial post, she would also genuinely be benefiting from emotional
support from her followers:
“…so obviously [blogging about a] breakup will surely get [my blog] many hits…
because people are curious what… and [they] like to gossip… but some readers will
surely leave nice comments to, you know, cheer me up… and I’ll be lying if I say [their
comments] don’t make me feel good, right?”
Influencer Tina, who frequently travels for work, enjoys the companionship from her
followers:
“… I mean, it’s nice to read comments from reader… you can tell some of them really
put in a lot of effort… and like when I travel and I’m alone in the hotel… I feel
supported… when I read and reply…”
On a more practical level, Influencer Brittany, who has been blogging since 2005,
acknowledges her followers’ contributions towards improving her Influencer practice:
“Some of my readers have been with me for very long… they are very sweet, they will
say, oh maybe you can blog more about this… or maybe you can improve on this…”
As evidenced, influencers’ communicative intimacy can sincerely engender personal
attachments despite being motivated by “underlying commercial interests” (Abidin &
Thompson 2012:472).
In uencers and interactive intimacies
Influencers are one form of “microcelebrity”, which are “a new style of online
performance that involves people ‘amping up’ their popularity over the Web using
technologies like video, blogs and social networking sites” (Senft 2008:25). However, a
distinctive feature of influencers in Singapore is their extensive integration of face-toface meet-ups with followers on a regular basis, in formal and informal settings.
Formal events include those sponsored and organised by clients in conjunction with the
launch of a new product or service, or parties (i.e. birthdays, anniversaries, festive
occasions, meet & greet sessions, photo-taking sessions) organised by influencers that
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are sponsored in kind by clients (i.e. venue, party favours, F&B, photography, make up,
wardrobe) in exchange for advertorial publicity.
Informal events include those casually organised by influencers themselves, such as
Christmas giveaways and lucky dips for selected followers, and impromptu coffee
sessions in cafes where followers can take the opportunity to snap selfies with
influencers. These physical interactions usually incorporate the use of a dedicated
event hashtag that followers are encouraged to use while they “live Tweet” or “live
Instagram” their activities. Such practices are also commonly incentivised through
competitions such as giveaways to selected users on the hashtag, or prizes awarded to
the best Tweet or Instagram post.
These physical space interactions complement digital space engagements because
influencers are expected to perform their personae in congruence with depictions they
have displayed on their blogs and social media. As such, the intimacies fostered and
negotiated in digital platforms[5] are transferred to physical settings[6], in a feedback
loop that amplifies the sense of intimacy followers feel towards influencers.
In uencers and reciprocal intimacies
Unlike mainstream celebrity practitioners (Marwick & boyd 2011) who still convey a
sense of distance and hierarchy with their Twitter fans, influencers in Singapore are
highly responsive and communicate reciprocal intimacies with their followers. Many
influencers are likely to “favourite” or “like” (on Twitter and YouTube), “retweet” (on
Twitter), or reply with smiley faces and heart shaped emoji (on blogs and Instagram) to
comments from followers as a sign of acknowledgement and appreciation. This practice
also publicises a follower’s handle to the influencers’ tens of thousands of followers, in
what is known as a “shout out”.
For instance Influencer Natalie retweets every single Tweet from followers who
mention her even though these may number in the mid-hundreds on a daily basis;
Influencer Rena often begins or closes her blogposts with a brief shout out or thanks to
followers who have written personal emails to her; and Influencer Brittany, who
accedes to having selfies taken with followers who see her in public, regularly tells
followers to send her copies of the photographs that she collates and posts on her
platforms.
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In uencers and disclosive intimacies
A key feature of lifestyle influencers is documenting the trivial and mundane aspects of
everyday life (i.e. outfit of the day, #nomakeup selfies, close-ups of pimples and bad
skin, gripes about housework) and how well influencers can relate these to their
followers in dialogue. In addition, influencers engaged in official “glamorous” events
may also run a parallel “behind-the-scenes” commentary disclosing “insider
information” from the Influencer’s point of view. An example would be captures of
influencers in dressing rooms being dolled up by make up artistes and hairdressers, or
teasers of potential outfits soliciting followers’ opinions. When juxtaposed against the
exclusive and glamorous opportunities (i.e. interactions with public personalities and
mainstream celebrities, high fashion shoots with expensive labels, previews and media
screenings at events) in which influencers engage, these “behind-the-scenes” portrayals
of ordinary and relatable everyday life gives followers the impression that they are
privy to the private, usually inaccessible aspects of influencers’ lives.
In other words, influencers are “more interesting than actors because they are
perceived to represent commonality” (Danesi 2008:225). Thus, unlike the flexible
corporate workers in Gregg’s (2011) study who experience an invasive intimacy as an
undesired consequence from working with online technologies, the influencers in this
study intentionally use digital media to craft, convey, and sustain intimacies with their
followers. Unlike older media like fan magazines and behind-the-scenes entertainment
news that are still largely managed by a production crew, published, edited, and
distributed after a lag time, the posts put out by influencers are more amateur and raw,
and allowed for immediate interactivity and response from followers. Stripped of
bureaucratic negotiations and social distance, followers are able to view interactions
with influencers as more personal, direct, swift, and thus intimate (boyd 2006).
However, this is not to say that influencers are engaging in full disclosure and have
obliterated public/private boundaries, or that they have no concerns over privacy.
Instead, influencers aestheticize and package snippets of the “backstage” (Goffman
1990) to present the illusion of an intimate sharing (i.e. a carefully arranged “just got
out of bed” selfie, a blogpost about a bad breakup in which only selective but highly
emotive aspects are shared).
Perceived Interconnectedness
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In their theory of parasocial relations, Horton & Wohl (1956) posit that television and
radio personalities produce one-sided interpersonal connections and an illusion of
intimacy with their audience through conversational small talk that appears informal,
casual, and responsive. This is supported by media personalities who appear to mingle
with their audience, and give the impression of rapport through the use of media
devices and theatrics. What the authors highlight is that parasocial relations enable the
audience to cultivate an extensive knowledge of the television or radio personality,
without any actual reciprocity involved. As evidenced, influencers enact similar
relations with followers through explicit displays of intimacy mediated on blogs and
social media platforms, albeit utilising a different structural rubric.
With the affordances of social media platforms, influencers directly control their selfrepresentation and interactions with followers by extending revelations into the
backstage “behind the scenes” and the use of personal voice (boyd 2006; Lövheim 2010)
to convey intimacy. The pace, quantity, and wide circulation of their social media posts
among followers contributes to the impression that influencers are constantly sharing
aspects of their personal lives with followers. Moreover, followers are often invited to
interact with influencers (i.e. “Ask me anything on this hashtag and I will compile an
AMA video[7]!”), to contribute to the curation of Influencer content from informal polls
(i.e. “Should I do part two of my Christmas holiday or blog about recent events first?
Comment to let me know!”), and to improve Influencer content through solicited
feedback (i.e. sidebar polls on blogs). As earlier iterated, the intimacies negotiated are
impressions that are felt by followers as opposed to whether or not these intimacies are
actually “authentic” or “genuine”. Hence, I use of the modifier “perceived” (in contrast
with “actual”) in branding the model of perceived interconnectedness.
In a separate paper (Abidin 2013), I investigate followers’ expectations of influencers,
the tension this invites into the social lives of influencers, and influencers’ motivations
for staying in the industry. Specifically, I detailed how the practice of perceived
interconnectedness has resulted in social tensions in influencers’ personal lives as:
immediacy (need for short response time), constancy (need for responses around the
clock), exclusivity (need for personalised attention and responses), intimacy (need to
foster feeling of familiarity), and quality (need to produce thoughtful responses). In
reaction, influencers cope by: disregarding haters, publicly shaming haters, adapting to
readers’ demands, drawing topical boundaries, and demarcating work and leisure
hours. Despite these drawbacks, influencers are motivated to continue their personae
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management because they accept these tensions as part of their job, give in to the
pressure to perform well, and derive a sense of satisfaction from their work.
In this paper, I have analysed how influencers appropriate and mobilise different types
of intimacies with the use of digital technologies. Drawing on my ethnographic
evaluations and Horton & Wohl’s (1956) notion of parasocial relations, this section
builds a model of communication through which influencers convey intimacies, that I
term perceived interconnectedness. In comparing perceived interconnectedness to
parasocial relations, I look at seven distinctions: medium (where communication takes
place), primary strategy (how communication mainly is achieved), origin of strategy
(who controls the primary strategy), organisation of actors (how producers and
audiences relate to each other), authority of dissemination (who controls
communication), flow of dialogue (how communication runs between producers and
audiences), and conversational structure (how communication is configured among
producers and audiences). The primary distinctions between parasocial relations and
perceived interconnectedness are tabulated as follows:
Element
Parasocial Relations
Perceived
Interconnectedness
Medium
TV/radio technology
Social media platforms
Primary strategy
Theatrics
Intimacies
Origin of strategy
Constructed by producer
Co-constructed by
producer and audience
Organisation of actors
Hierarchical
Flat
Authority of
dissemination
Broadcast
Interactive
Flow of dialogue
Unidirectional
Bi-directional
Conversational structure
One-to-many
One-to-many, One-to-one
Parasocial Relations is mediated via a more rigid infrastructure of TV/radio technology,
which stimulates a hierarchical organisation of actors where TV/radio personalities
control the discursive dialogue. The information disseminated is broadcast top-down,
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there is low reciprocity since viewers are unlikely to respond in a unidirectional flow of
content, and the structure is one-to-many. Parasocial Relations is constructed on the
back of the TV/radio personality at the production backend, and primarily engages in
theatrics to sustain itself.
In contrast, perceived interconnectedness is mediated via a more democratic and
equalising infrastructure of social media platforms, which stimulate a flat organisation
of actors where influencers and followers co-produce and shape the conversation. The
information disseminated is interactive and malleable, given that there is high
reciprocity in a bidirectional conversation that is simultaneously one-to-many (as when
influencers publish posts to hundreds of thousands of fans) and one-to-one (as when
influencers favourite, repost, or reply to individual responses from readers via Tweets,
Instagram comments, blog replies, or personal emails). Perceived interconnectedness is
co-constructed by influencers and followers, and primarily engages in intimacy
strategies to sustain itself.
Conclusion
The allure of influencers is premised on the ways they engage with their followers to
give the impression of exclusive, “intimate” exchange through digital and physical
space interactions, where “intimacy” is emically understood to be how familiar and
close followers feel to an Influencer. Unlike mainstream celebrities in traditional media
industries, lifestyle influencers are everyday, ordinary Internet users whose lives “as
lived” are the central themes of their output, wherein followers are privy to what
appears to be genuine, raw, and usually inaccessible aspects of influencers’ personal
lives. In this paper, I have demonstrated how influencers appropriate and mobilise four
types of intimacies with followers: commercial, interactive, reciprocal, and disclosive.
Following from this and drawing on Horton & Wohl’s parasocial relations, I described a
model of perceived interconnectedness through which influencers convey intimacies to
followers.
Unlike earlier models of intimacy labour in which women actors engage in conjugal
relationships and domestic labour (Constable 2009) or customer service (Hochschild
1983), in which producers practice distance from their audience (Marwick & boyd
2011), and in which flexible corporate workers experience unintended intimacies as a
consequence of online technologies (Gregg 2011), influencers chiefly engage in displays
and impressions of intimacy towards their followers in order to convey the closeness
and relatability upon which the success of their advertorials lies. It is noted that this
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intimacy labour is not without tensions and drawbacks (Abidin 2013), however
influencers are ultimately motivated by “underlying commercial interests” (Abidin &
Thompson 2012:472) and expend effort to maintain impressions of intimacies with
followers. Additionally, unlike older media like fan magazines and behind-the-scenes
entertainment news which entail bureaucratic production processes and a lag time
before publication, influencers’ posts are personal, direct, and swift, and allow for
immediate interactivity and response from followers. Together, these DIY strategies
constitute the model of perceived interconnectedness through which influencers can
communicate intimacies to their followers.
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[1]For a case study on how Instagram use is integrated in the Influencer industry in
Singapore, see
