← New Books Network
New Books Network
Sophie Bishop, "Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture" (U California Press, 2025)
00:32:03
Loading summary
Transcript21 lines
- [00:00]
A
This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter. And the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code N B N O V I D. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:55]
B
Welcome to New Books in Critical Theory. It's a podcast that's part of the New Books Network. On this episode I'm talking to Sophie Bishop about Influencer Creep, how optimization, authenticity and self branding transform creative culture. So welcome to the podcast.
- [02:10]
C
Thank you so much for having me. I'm very excited to be here. This.
- [02:15]
B
I mean, you've written a book that is like so perfectly well timed. And it's funny because like, academic books kind of Take ages to write. And we might talk a little bit, actually about the timing of the book, but it speaks to, you know, kind of precisely what we're witnessing with online cultures at the moment. And I guess the place to start probably is with the title, with the kind of big idea in the book. So what is influencer creep? What is this big idea?
- [02:48]
C
Okay, we're going straight in. So historically or like, since I started my academic career, I've been researching influencers. When I was doing my PhD, they weren't called influencers, they were called bloggers, video bloggers, content creators, YouTubers. But my work's always been about how we can think about influencer work as part of creative industries. So not thinking about it as something that's really separate or something that's brand new, but actually something that's continued on from, you know, the creative industries that we have. Particularly my work focuses in the uk, so I'm looking at it in the context of advertising, in the context of different, like, funding schemes, and in the context of. Of the relationship between the people that work on these platforms and the platforms themselves. So, yeah, anyway, all of my work has been about influencers. And in 2020, I decided I didn't want to research influencers for the moment. I wanted to give it a bit of a pause, have a bit of a break. So I decided I wanted to research artists and talk to them about how they use different social media platforms, but especially Instagram because it's such a visual platform and it's very heavily used in the art world. But the problem was when I started interviewing artists about their experiences, they were basically telling me exactly the same stories that influencers have been telling me for the, like, you know, seven years that I've been researching them prior to this new project. And it. And it was uncanny, really. Like, it was actually, you know, I was surprised and maybe I shouldn't have been. Maybe that's a bit naive, but it was. And we'll get into the details of this, I guess, during the conversation. But yeah, the ways that they were using social media and how that affected their practice was very, very similar to the influencers that I'd studied before. So I kind of started theorizing this around influencer creep. So how influencers are actually really important figures. They're tastemakers, they're trendsetters, they're very strategic, they're very smart. And how they work and the strategies that they've used to navigate the conditions of social media platform work are really increasingly relevant to us all. So that influencer culture has crept out far beyond, you know, a very small niche area of content creation on social media platforms. And actually, it impacts all of us in our everyday lives.
- [05:19]
B
I mean, you mentioned the platforms there and you've talked about Instagram. It'd be good to hear a bit about, like, the platforms, because one of the things you say quite early on in the book is the platforms are like, kind of like false friends. I think you use the term. They're like capricious, inconsistent, they're risky. And obviously, like, the platforms never say this. The platform's like, oh, we're awesome, you know, like, come and give us your content. And yeah, it'd be good to hear a bit about why the platforms are maybe a bit kind of unstable, a bit sort of risky for both, actually influencers and artists.
- [05:55]
C
Yes, that's a good question. So platforms are. They need content creators, right? Like, the reason that we go on social media is to, like, be. Is to consume content, like, whether that's from our friends, but usually it's also with some professional content creators, like, at the same time. So they say platforms do need content creators, but importantly, we have to remember that they are mostly beholden to advertisers. So advertisers are the ones paying the bills, keeping the lights on. And a lot of the moves that platforms make is because they want to keep advertisers happy. They want to make sure that content on social media platforms is getting as much engagement as possible so those eyeballs can be selled. So the advertisers. And we want to also make sure that that content is very, like, commercially friendly. So I guess that's a bit of a context about the platforms. So the way that social media platforms work too, is that they promote content using algorithms. And this, I think, is kind of common knowledge now, but it's often very, very unclear how those algorithms work, like, how and why we're promoting certain content and we're not promoted other forms of content. For people like influencers and increasingly artists, there's a real frustration because, firstly, they can't understand how these algorithms work. Secondly, there's no recourse if they feel like their content is being unfairly hidden. And thirdly, they have absolutely no ownership over their audience. So even if their audience has clicked, follow, been like, yes, I definitely want to hear from this person. I want to hear updates from this person. That doesn't necessarily mean that you are going to get those updates. Like platforms absolutely decide whether it's intentional or part of an inscrutable range of algorithmic signals. They decide what gets promoted, what doesn't. And there's really no guarantee that even the people who have deliberately opted in to hear from you, there's no guarantee that they actually will. Also, I think some important context is that I was doing the research for this book in. In why I started it in early 2020. So obviously Covid was really kicking off and a lot of artists were actually getting a lot of followers on Instagram for a couple of reasons, because, you know, people were stuck inside. They were using screens more, they were, you know, using Instagram more. And also they had kind of more disposable income and. And they were stuck inside in domestic space, like they wanted to make their homes nice. So a lot of the artists that I was talking to had like, just received loads and loads of new followers. But then as my research continued that like, a lot of those followers either went away or they weren't, or artists found that the content wasn't being promoted to those audiences. And that was a real problem because they'd quit their jobs, they'd taken redundancy based on the fact that they had this online audience that they would be able to sell their work to. So there's. And there's a real reliance on that visibility when, yeah, it's like, not guaranteed at all and can kind of be taken away at any moment.
- [09:22]
B
What do the. I mean, it's why I was going to say what are the two groups, influences and artists do in response. But actually like, one of the things the book says, and one of the points about influencer creep is how much that the two are kind of blurred now and particularly some of the artists sound a lot like influencers as you're describing them. And the kind of aesthetics of some of the influences are quite kind of artistic too. But, yeah, like, what is the kind of response, I guess, to these quite closed and opaque and almost kind of mythical systems for the platforms to work? How do influencers respond to begin with?
- [10:01]
C
Yeah, so that's so the way I talk about it in the book. Yeah, basically I. I'm always banging my drum that influences are actually really smart and strategic and actually technically kind of orientated. A lot of the time influencers are dismissed in popular culture as being selfie obsessed or vain or, you know, just about fashion or whatever. But actually I would say that they have a really significant amount of technical knowledge about how social media platforms work because they're working on them all the time. So in the book, I talk about algorithmic gossip which is the way that people share information with each other about how algorithms work to build this understanding of the, of these black box kind of systems. And the way that they share and build knowledge is actually like, yeah, you know, quite scientific almost. People conduct experiments. They'll be, you know, sharing screen grabs from different moments during the day to try and follow how their visibility is tracking. They'll go and use different accounts. They'll also use platforms like Reddit to try and crowdsource an understanding of who is and isn't seeing their content. They'll ask their audience about what, how their content is visible to them. They're really, really paying close attention to like, the length of videos, the time they're posting, you know, what the video is about, like, whether it includes an image of a face, for example, or not. Like, so they're doing all, a lot of these tests. And, you know, like, when I continued my research, I found the artists were also doing a lot of these tests as well. Which is interesting to think about because that eats into time that artists could be spending making art. Right. A lot of the time they were telling me about quite lengthy, like quite lengthy information gathering processes they were doing on social media. But, you know, you wouldn't necessarily think that was like part of an artist day to day.
- [12:07]
B
I mean, the artist question that kind of intrigued me was about the, the art and the extent to which, you know, in some ways the artists are kind of forced to behave like influencers to. This isn't the right word, is it? But like almost professionalize around, you know, monitoring how content and engaging with the audience, trying to find, you know, better ways to get the platform to function to them. But what are they doing in terms of like, the actual art? Are they, you know, sort of finding stuff that works more for the algorithm or, you know, are they like, drawing a distance with their concept?
- [12:45]
C
Yeah. So I think, you know, for art worlds, I've always really struggled with this tension between commerciality and, you know, the fact that you, if you want to be a working artist, your work has to sell. And loads of people have written about that, like Howard Becker and Pierre Bourdieu. And, you know, there's a really, really rich body of work about that, really complicated tension. Um, so it's not new that I would say artists are like, trying to make work that's that, you know, attractive to an audience. But when I spoke to creators. Yeah. And also I keep using artists and creators interchangeably, which is a tension that we maybe could explore that I should really be Thinking more about, because where is that line? I. I don't know. But artists that I spoke to you, they were doing like, their artistic practice was changed based on the kind of work that they thought might be visible. So there were a couple of examples. There was sort of a understanding that bold, big, blocky work almost was quite easily consumable. So intricate, fine work is hard for people to understand when they're scrolling quickly. So there was this people thinking about, like, using motifs that were really colorful, big and bold, and attention grabbing. There were theories about how faces are very, very attractive on social media algorithms, whether that's because the audience likes seeing pictures of faces or whether that is something that's more coded. So I spoke to one person who used to be a landscape artist and she had moved into portraiture because she knew that that would get more attention on social media. And then also the way that people were making work was changing. So it was really important to get content of the process itself. So illustrators or fine artists would be wearing a GoPro, for example, like a camera on their head while they were drawing because they wanted to create, like, the time lapse of that process. Sometimes artists were doing work like underneath a mechanical arm that had a camera on it. But. And that. That all changes the embodied nature of artwork. Right. So I think that is important, like, you know, is changing the artistic process.
- [15:08]
B
One thing you mentioned there, that kind of like tension between art and money, which, you know, as you said, is like, overlapped and interrelated for ages. And then this, you know, kind of question of, of what gets kind of interest on the platform links to this question of, like, authenticity. And one of the things that comes out in the book is like, authenticity does kind of like, do well on platforms. People want a sense of content being, like, real. And again, we're kind of confronted. And the book discusses the way that, you know, there are definitely differences for influencers and artists or influencers, but actually, like, there's. There's quite a lot of similarities. So first off, like, what influencers doing to. I was going to say to seem as if they're authentic, but maybe to be like, you know, to present their authenticity.
- [16:05]
C
Yeah. And it's really hard, right, because everyone's, I guess, you know, a lot of my students or like, people I was feature in the press are like, well, like, what is authenticity? Or are influences actually authentic or are they fake? And I think it's exactly as you describe. You know, there's authenticity strategies and it's not really like, do we actually have an internal authenticity. I don't know, I'm not a philosopher, so I'll kind of leave that to someone else. But what are influencers doing? So. So they're doing two things, mostly. One is like, taking the professional edge off content production. So, you know, if we're. If we're putting influences in, like, comparison or holding them up against traditional media, then traditional media is like, you know, very tightly produced and glossy and. And high spec. So influencers, if they're trying to position themselves as authentic next to this, you take a little bit of that sheen off. So you might use, like, a little bit of a shaky camera. You might include a bit of background noise. You might film in your car, or you might film when you're going to the shops, or, like, include snippets of everyday moments. Like you're trying to, like. Yeah, just not be too, like, super glossy and put together. And then the other strategy is more of an emotional authenticity. So we include these emotions that you wouldn't traditionally or expect to see publicly. So tears, upset, anxiety, panic attacks, you know, disappointment, sharing, failure. Like a lot of tears. Like, tears are kind of big bucks in the influencer space. So there is this sort of strategic effort towards not being too shiny, not being too shiny while still being obviously very aspirational and alluring, but then also, like, being emotionally real, not just sharing the good times and the highlights.
- [17:58]
B
And what about artists? I mean, one thing you try and do is tease out the way that, like, it's not just the platforms the artists have to navigate these questions about authenticity. It's like being an artist is bound up with questions of authenticity. It's like part of the job description. So how do they do it?
- [18:17]
C
Yeah, exactly. So it's really difficult because, like, a lot of the artists discuss the fact that they, you know, especially now. I'm not going to talk too much about AI because I think we are going to touch on it later, like, the things that have changed. But if you are spending a lot of money on a handcrafted object or an artistic object, then you want to really feel some humanness, like, in the way that it's being created. You kind of want to understand who the artist is, and that's all, like, part of, you know, what you're. What you're buying into. With artisan objects, like, it's handmade, quality is really important. So artists felt a real pressure to communicate their technical skills, but also this very, like, personal human factor, and they really, really struggled with thinking about what to put online. So that's in terms of like their personal life, whether they would include their family, their pets, their animals, their, like. Oh yeah, well, pets are animals, but some of them had like chickens and a small holding and they lived in like a beautiful, you know, linen clad cottage. Like, you know, there were some people's lives who were like genuinely more artistic, seeming like, or bohemian or whatever than others. So the real struggle there to like think about where their privacy and their boundaries were. And a lot of people were sharing moments from their everyday lives because they realized that that was actually getting quite a lot of response from their audience. But it was something that they were really, really wrestling with.
- [19:53]
B
You reminded me of some of those collectors who talk about, you know, I don't buy art, I'm buying the artist, you know, that, that kind of sense. And it's a quite a good way to go back to one of the things you talked about earlier on about platforms, which is like where the money comes from. And obviously like with art they can do like, you know, actual sales of the work. Influencers, you know, sometimes it's more to do with getting, you know, sponsorship deals, brand deals, you know, as well as kind of building a monetizable audience. And I'm intrigued, I guess, as to like, what this means in terms of the money, like, influences. It struck me reading the kind of later chapters in the book are in some ways like, much more dependent on brands and being like, good for brands, which obviously means, you know, there's questions about particular topics being like, not what brands want to be associated with, even if they're really important for the influencers. And then it's kind of like slightly different for the artist, but you still see the artist kind of like grappling with this. Like, what if I say something and it isn't quite what a potential partner might kind of like or be into. So, yeah, where the kind of brands and I suppose the kind of influence of potential like sponsors and partners fit in.
- [21:17]
C
Yeah, so that's such a good question. I really like how you put that because there's always that question about, you know, the imagined audience or like the potential audience, like who's seeing your content. And artists especially did have to navigate like thinking about the different intermediaries that were also viewing their Instagram profiles. So it's not just going to be your audience, but if you're an illustrator, then it might be like potential editors, the New York Times or the Atlantic or Guardian, you know, that might commission you. If you're a weaver, then there might be an interior designer that actually might, you know, be purchasing this kind of work for a very wealthy client. Similarly with fine artists, you know, there's gallerists, there's different representatives that you might work with that are going to be on looking for artists on social media as well. So there's that and that's really, really difficult because then if you're including a lot of stuff about your personal life, you also do want to see in professional. So it's really hard to manage that. And I think we can also talk about the political economy of social media more widely. So influencers work with brands directly. Influencers do brand deals like that are directly with brands, but they also have to post on social media platforms that are funded by brands. And there's certain kinds of content that will be removed from social media platforms because brands don't like it. So for example, nudes, that's a really big question when it comes to artists because the nude is like, you know, a key motif in artworks. It has been for a very long time. But if you make work that involves nudes, then your work is not going to be acceptable to be posted on social media. It's going to be removed. And then if, you know, if people can't see it on social media, then like, where are they going to see it? So, and there are places that are going to see it. Obviously there are like offline art spaces still exist, but you know, increasingly I would say Instagram is super central to art world. So. Yes. And like another thing I would also mention is that artists are like, do work for brands a lot too and they always have. And that can be a really important like financial source. Right. Like, you know, if you're trying to build an income, as, you know, you talk about in your work, there's the amount of, you know, government funding is not going up, it is going down. And you have to think about how to, to actually build an income in creative industries. You know, you're going to be definitely open to working with brands because they pay a lot of money, like compared to piecemealing together and Your, you know, 10,000 pound arts council applications that you have to do every single year or you know, even more frequently than that. So yeah, so brands are really, really important in this space in a number of ways, like for artists and also influencers too.
- [24:13]
B
I mean, funding going down is, I guess it's kind of like a change since you were working on the book and that kind of space between you submitting the manuscript and the book coming out and you mentioned the impact of AI, which even in six months, definitely within a year, has been really kind of accelerating these questions about the sustainability of artistic lives, but also is kind of crowding the space for influencers too, in terms of just the amount of slop that now is around on the platforms. So what kind of things have sort of changed? And I'm also intrigued by what kind of things are similar or where does the analysis, because I said this at the start, kind of stay with us. Even if people might be like, oh, you haven't talked about AI, everything must be different. Actually, what are the things that. No, the books kind of central points are really still important.
- [25:09]
C
Yeah. I would say the rise of AI means that influencer creep is actually more and more important, which is obviously lucky for me, but I'll say why? Because I think it's all about that kind of human quality that I talked about, like, you know, in an earlier answer. Like, I would say that if you are going to be buying, you know, if you're paying someone to do an illustration, if you're paying someone to create you a handmade object, like, as opposed to something that might be produced by AI, and that I guess, has more implications for digital artists, illustrators, fine artists who are making more digital online work. The human quality of that work, if you're going to be paying someone to do it, is increasingly important. And the ways that you promote yourself and you also promote that sort of authentic artistic aura is by doing the strategies that influence a creep. It's showing your authentic life. It's showing that you have, you know, perspective, a brand that has value, that lends value to your work. It's also, you know, going to be really important to be visible in a space that is crowded with slop, like you said. So optimization, the strategies of breaking through the noise and becoming visible are increasingly important. So I would say, like influencer creep strategies, you know, they're going to be taken up more and more and there's more and more pressure to really like, defend ourselves as human creators. And that, you know, might be true for academics as well. And also I would say, like, we've. It's one thing that happened between doing this research and writing the book, or like not writing the book, but the book being published is the rise of, of TikTok, which isn't really talked about in the book. And when I spoke to artists about TikTok, there was this perception that, like, Tick Tock's just for young people and kids and they don't have money to buy Art anyway, so it's kind of like not, you know, it's not. It didn't seem like something that was necessary to be a part of. But I've seen a lot more artists enter into the Tick Tock space space in the last couple of years. And that's really challenging, I think, because, you know, Instagram is one thing where a lot of it is about visual culture and. And you can post artwork, just like, you know, images of artwork and production and whatever, and that's, you know, one thing. But TikTok is like, how are you going to like, do a little dance when you're firing a pot or like, you know, do like, how are you going to make that engaging for these really short videos that need to have a hook? Like, it's so much effort. It's another thing that people have to consider. So. Yeah, so that is another change as well that I feel like maybe gets missed in this AI conversation.
- [28:05]
B
It makes me wonder whether is there a kind of sequel on, you know, art talk or whatever, you know, the kind of equivalent of booktok which has kind of grown up in the last kind of like couple of years? Or are you thinking about projects which are a bit like actually, you know, because you mentioned earlier on about, like, want to take a kind of a slightly different direction and study artists for a while rather than just studying influencers and platforms. So in terms of like, what you're doing next, are you thinking of something kind of completely different or the like, you know, loads of kind of research possibilities that you're following up from this book?
- [28:43]
C
There's low. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if you feel like this when you finish a book, but it's like, you know, you spend so long, like focusing on one thing and now it's like, oh, God, yeah, I do have to think about what I'm doing next. I mean, I am doing the classic thing, which I think is like, very feminized, but it's like I had a baby or so in this, in this time and parenting TikTok is wild. And I really got into it, like over my maternity leave. It's. There's a lot happening. There's an also, also really interesting thing where a lot of people who have babies are like, specifically trying to become influencers during a short period of time because they. Because, you know, we get actually a very short paid maternity leave in this country. Like, you're really only paid your full wage for like three months. So they want to extend their maternity leave by getting money from TikTok. And so there's like a very deliberate strategy to be like, you know, to try and get followers to try and get to ramp up their following like super quickly in order to not have to go back to work, which is actually quite dystopian and just like a phenomenon that I found really, really interesting. So that is like the classic, you know, social media researcher or media studies researcher has a baby and then starts researching parents and young and children. So that's one thing I've been thinking about. But yeah, I do think that there's like, there is something to say about TikTok and art world and like, I'm interested in your perspective on this day. Like, I couldn't find very much about like the relationship between art and social media. Looking at sociology, like, you know, I've drawn from as much as possible of that work in the book and there's like really, really great work on it by like Hannah Wall and, you know, and many others that I cite. But. And also, yeah, I mean, like, and the, you know, the classics like Becca. But I couldn't find a lot of critical research on the sociology of art online. Oh yeah, Karen Patel is writing a lot too and her work is great. But yeah, I couldn't find a lot. So maybe I should be doing a bit more on like TikTok and artists, I don't know.