We’re all influencers now – and that’s scary

sucks you deeper and deeper into the minutiae of your own life until you’re unable to walk past a wall without seeing a photo op.

No, the real danger of micro-fame is that, as these influencers show, it utterly distorts your sense of self-importance. Micro-fame naturally inflates your own sense of relevance: of course you think you’re a big deal when people are incessantly reacting to your most trivial life events.

And then as soon as you get even a small number of followers, it’s very easy to start constantly asking yourself, ‘‘What would my fans think?’’

Not only does this mindset make you both simultaneously very self-conscious and incredibly boring. The truly scary part is that you start feeling like you should be saying something to your fans about whatever is going on right now.

You need to be relevant, current, informative

. . . you need to commentate on what’s happening because you’re a personality now. And not only that, but since people are watching you and your life, you have a responsibility to address them.

Insta-fame makes you feel you need an opinion, to react, to say something, to centre yourself in the middle of every current event. And that deeply impacts on your ability to know when to sit down, shut up and not take a photo. Hence you can end up making a virus outbreak that has killed at least 132 people all about you.

Hence why you end up looking so laughable.

But we probably shouldn’t be laughing too hard, because influencers aren’t just big celebrities and fitness freaks any more. We’re pretty much all influencers now. And that means the perils of small fame are coming for us all.

Think about it. Even if you’ve only got a few hundred fans on IG, that makes you a nanoinfluencer. And that makes you a hot target right now with marketers wanting to work with tiny influencers and their more ‘‘authentic’’ brands.

And maybe you don’t think of yourself as having ‘‘fans’’. But if you’ve got a few hundred followers on Twitter then you inevitably start crafting your tweets for a maximum response from those followers.

If you’ve got a Linkedin, you’re constantly thinking about who in your professional circles will be reading your posts.

In other words, you’re already thinking like an influencer. And as that follower count goes up, you creep closer and closer to the minefield mindset of micro-fame.

So we might have fun right now, laughing at these influencers and their tasteless lack of selfawareness, but we’ve probably got one hiding in all of us.