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Coms 401 - Influencers - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Much of their work is done behind the scenes, or not viewed as actual "work". Posting selfies on instagram, commenting on posts and interacting with mutuals on different media platforms all work towards further promoting the creator in their digital space. Within the Attention Economy, these creators are rewarded through views and clicks, with all of the behind the scene labour (tacit labor) being used to hopefully gain as much attention possible, and hold onto it to develop it into a solid brand.
        
        This isn't the only type of work that creators must partake in, they may need to do emotional labor. Creating and establishing a solid relationship with their audience, promoting an image that is real, authentic and genuine helps their audience relate to them. They must navigate through impression management, find ways that they may need to alter their image or brand to better fit their audience and the ever-changing trends that they may need to follow in order to stay relevant.
      - Credibility is important as it establishes the influencers as someone who can be trusted and listened to, they are one of the people (Wellman, 2021).
  - - - Women are pressured into prodcuing content that does not deviate from the social norm, or the hegemonic idealized values that are consistently reconstructed and circulated. By following these ideas, they are more likely to reach a wider audience and become more visible, not only because this is the standard, but because the algorithm recognizes this and further promotes this content. Female creators who express neoliberal values and showcase their balance between doing the show they love, where they are a successful entrepreneur, but they are also a loving mother and wife who still takes time out of her day to tend to her kids and husband, prepare food and clean all at the same time.
        
        Not only women, but women of colour are further pushed into the back of the media platforms. Not only are they women, but they are part of another racial minority group. Further isolating them if they are apart of the LGBTQ+ community. While many platforms want to promote the idea that they are inclusive and a free creative space, there have been many instances where black creators and their content is not being shown to as many people in comparison to white creators, or where many LGBTQ+ videos and content gets banned or removed beacuse of unresonable ban requests, while many straight or cis creators do not face these same hardships. While
- - - - These conditional standards can be noticed when the absence of other LGBTQ+ members within this community, or across many different platforms is taken into account. The amount of gay men within the beauty community is quite high, which is great to create a more diverse environment. However, how many of these men are apart of racial minorities? There is very small media present of lesbian women in this community, because they simply do not fit within the neoliberal ideas and values that are "necessary".
  - - - The experience of a Black, lesbian woman creating content on a platfrom like YouTube would be incredibly different than that of a straight white man on the same platform. From the way that their audience interacts with them, and their ability to reach this audience is not based solely on skill of the influencer. No matter the content these two produce, there are so many different outside factors that manipulate their ability to self-brand successfuklly, and in doing so, generate a stable foundation of reassuring audience users.
        
        Just like with the Post-Queer Femininities topic, where the presence of gay men within the beauty community "showed that equality had been reached", the appearance of these strong indpependant women working for themselves and making money is used to show the idea that femininity is outdated and no longer necessary.
        
        These women take away from the "legitimate" content on the site, away from the users that actually play games and are good at them. These women are "unfairly" using their bodies and profiting off of their femininity (Ruberg, et al., 2019), however, woman are sexualized due geo the fact that they are women in the first place.
        
        As Banet-Weiser states (2018), popular feminism thrives in an "economy of visibility". This visibility is the goal, not the results of activism leading to political or social change.
        
        Continuing with the implicit and explicit perceived differences between male and female creators, is that many times women are referred to as influencers. In most cases, men are given the title of content creator. The mens work is recognized and understood to be work. they put time and effort into their content that their audience gets to enjoy, while on the other hand, women are referred as influencers. This immediately seems to dismiss any of the work they put Tinto content creation, as the term influencer is often seen in a more negative light then content creator.
      - Gender is intersectional, it affects individuals differently across race, class, age, sexual relations, etc (Butler, 1998,1999; Hooks 2000, 2015). These very ideas of what make up gender go to morph the ideologies of what is considered masculine and feminine.
- - - - Taking intersectionality into account, the algorithm does not affect all creators or influences the same way. As stated before, a white cis man will be not as negatively affected by the algorithm as a black woman, regardless of the content that is produced.