Publications & Presentations

Abstract:

Virtual influencers are characters native to social media, typically designed to promote brands, products and/or messages, and recognisable for their animated (often computer-generated) appearance. Since the late 2010s, virtual influencers have appeared online with increasing frequency, populating a growing number of social media platforms. They form part of a lengthy timeline of virtual celebrity, spanning East Asia’s history of virtual idols, Hollywood’s cinematic synthespians, and the computer-generated ‘cyberbabes’ that frequented Western pop culture in the late 1990s. It thus comes as little surprise that press coverage of virtual influencers reiterates many of the qualities praised of their predecessors, highlighting the unique capabilities of their immaterial bodies, and celebrating their ability to transcend the corporeal limitations of ‘celebrity-commodities’ (Turner et al., 2000) made of flesh-and-blood. Presenting preliminary findings from my PhD project, this paper focuses on the malleable, immaterial bodies of virtual influencers, drawing on a combination of digital ethnography, document analysis and web archaeology to situate what I call the predictability, portability, pliability and profitability of virtual influencers’ digitised bodies within the commercial context and demands of contemporary celebrity culture.

Abstract:

We are interested in discussing and dissecting the urban spaces inhabited by virtual influencers: an emergent cohort of social media characters who are designed to attract and accumulate online audiences, but have no singular referent in the offline world. Recognisable for their animated appearance, virtual influencers are typically created with computer-generated imagery and animation, with their features and fashions, in many cases, mapped onto corporeal body doubles. Whether fleshy or entirely pixelated, the bodies of virtual influencers are endlessly posed, inserted or composited into ‘real’ locations (including urban streets, tourist attractions, eateries, and museums), and captured, edited and uploaded to social media. In the reverse, virtual influencers’ bodies are also often brought ‘out’ of social media, featured on digital billboards for advertising campaigns with brand partners, or ‘installed’ as part of promotional activations, as at IKEA Harajuku in Japan and Funan Mall in Singapore. Engaging and modernising the substantive tradition of anthropological and sociological scholarship on virtual worlds, we introduce the figure of the virtual influencer, and explore its embodiment of the liminality between the ‘virtual’ and the ‘real’. We also consider how the spaces inhabited by virtual influencers may challenge or enhance established conceptualisations of ‘non-places’ (Augé, 1995/1997) and ‘third places’ (Oldenburg, 1989/1999), by transforming innocuous, impersonal and ephemeral urban locations into sites of (cultural) identity and meaning-making, mediated by the technologies, affordances and ‘platform vernaculars’ (Gibbs et al., 2015) of contemporary social media.

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Abstract:

Informed by my first six months of doctoral research, this paper offers a topography of virtual influencers that at once acknowledges their continuation of and breaking with the precedents of a lineage of “virtual beings” who have achieved celebrity status. Responding to the ahistoricism of much recent commentary, it draws on archival press and web research to situate virtual influencers at the intersection of technological advancements, discourses, and anxieties similarly characterising Hollywood’s “synthespians” at the turn of the twenty-first century; the legacy of “virtual idols” in East Asia (also known as “Vocaloids” in Japan); and the latter’s recent democratisation by a new generation of“vTubers” across video-sharing sites. Recognising this cross-medium migration of virtual celebrity—from anime, video games and blockbuster cinema to the participatory web—this paper adopts a platform-specific lens to highlight the affordances, cultures and vernaculars of specific social media as essential to virtual influencers’ aspiration to, and attainment and maintenance of, attention and fame.

Abstract:

The phrase “I miss the old YouTube” returns thousands of results across the web, appearing in all sorts of digital laments. Often it is reactionary, responding to site updates or policies that have caused frustration among users. In many cases, however, the phrase is punctuated with sad or crying emojis, embedded in posts that express a sense of nostalgia for the platform’s past content, culture and sense of community. Within the myriad posts of this kind, there is one community for whom this yearning for the “old YouTube” has become a near constant refrain, centring on a group of creators known as the British YouTubers, whose height in popularity can be roughly charted from 2012 to 2014. While the British YouTubers offered audiences an array of content, their immense appeal owed less to the topics of their videos than to the web of friendship, romances, and kinship that united the group. Viewers were drawn to the intense, intimate relationships these vloggers shared, enjoying the affective experience of this intimacy across “collab”(-oration) videos, social media updates, and the daily vlogs in which their lives frequently intersected. This paper examines how the nostalgia for this group of British YouTubers intersects with the broader nostalgia for the (relatively recent) “old YouTube”. It adopts an affective lens, overlaying Misha Kavka’s (2008) work on “technologies of intimacy” with Rebecca Williams’ (2015) theorisations of “post-object fandom” and Ross Garner’s (2018) “affective fluctuations” to contextualise this phenomenon within longitudinal perspectives of fandom, affect and attachment. In so doing, this paper aims to illuminate how nostalgia for the “old YouTube” relates not only to the evolution of the platform, but also to users’ affective experiences of and with social media, and the ways these endure and resurface as both the web (and its users) continues to evolve.

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Abstract:

In late 2017, videos reacting to the results of personal DNA tests started trending on YouTube. Despite the number of companies offering products of this kind, these videos overwhelmingly featured the at-home DNA kits of biometrics company 23andMe. This was no coincidence. Months earlier, 23andMe had received FDA approval to advertise their newest personal genome tests, and was heavily investing into YouTube to market them. Alongside pre-roll video ads, 23andMe recruited numerous YouTubers to create sponsored videos featuring their products, engaging the credibility of these influencers to promote 23andMe to their vast online audiences.

Quite unexpectedly, the highly personal, revelatory and easily narrativised process of at-home DNA testing captured the imagination of the YouTube community. Viewers flocked to videos claiming to reveal the “truth” about their favourite YouTubers’ family histories, and other, lesser-known started began producing unaffiliated DNA test videos in an effort to capitalise on the public interest. With specific reference to the affective ties that inform YouTube celebrity (see Berryman & Kavka, 2017), and YouTube’s contemporary advertising ecosystem, this paper charts the rise and normalisation of DNA test result videos on YouTube—in spite of growing societal concerns around the potential and security of (biological) data.

Abstract:

As much recent scholarship has observed, YouTube celebrity is preoccupied with authenticity. Unlike the Hollywood star system, which, as Dyer famously remarked, is sustained by the question of ‘really,’ the public personas of YouTube celebrities are from the outset presumed to be ‘really’ real, grounded in claims of ordinariness which support the perception that they reflect the individuals’ true (offline) selves. However, little academic attention has so far been paid to the ways that YouTubers often highlight the artifice of their own online personas; nor how, in so doing, these YouTubers are in fact able to strengthen their claims to authenticity, deepening the trust and support of their audience at the same time as they call their own credibility into question.

To tease out this contradiction, this paper offers a close textual analysis of the popular docuseries’ produced by YouTuber Shane Dawson, which focus on creators with failing or tarnished reputations: Grav3yardgirl, Tana Mongeau, Jeffree Star, and Jake Paul. Though YouTube fame is often seen to operate beyond the jurisdiction of ‘cultural intermediaries’ such as managers, publicists or public relations (Rojek, 2012), I argue that Dawson’s docuseries’ perform a familiar function, updating traditional image rehabilitation strategies for the age of social media celebrity. In offering a behind-the-scenes look at the ‘real’ identity of these creators, Dawson’s series’ at once expose the inauthenticity of these YouTubers’ online behaviours, and use this authority to curate more sympathetic celebrity personas, making these available for the reparation of public relations and audience affections.