We’re all influencers now – and that’s scary
Idon’t know why we’re still shocked at influencers’ capacity to be tasteless. I mean, at this point, expecting an influencer to have some degree of context or sensitivity is like expecting Scott Morrison to show insightful and firm leadership. History shows us it’s never going to happen but we can’t stop hoping . . .
We really shouldn’t, given their track record for tastelessness. In 2017, there was a craze for Auschwitz yolo selfies. And last year’s fad for G-string-at-Chernobyl shots where influencers unpeeled radiation suits to reveal their carefully curated undies.
So really, this week’s crop of influencers posing seductively with surgical masks in the wake of the coronavirus outbreak is par for the course. Everything seems to be #content now, from your favourite laxatives to your labiaplasty. It’s a wellestablished pattern: influencers react insensitively to some current event, and it triggers an equally predictable backlash of moral outrage.
The more I thought about the influencers this week, posing in masks and posting virus-related health tips, the less shocked I was.
A lot of people think that staging these shoots looks like you’re capitalising on an epidemic to score some vanity points. But in an influencer’s world, this is just them acting in their role to educate and enlighten their followers – and happening to look gorgeous doing it.
So however tasteless or ill-timed this looks to the public, to influencers this is just them being responsible ‘‘public figures’’ looking out for their fans.
The latest controversy and subsequent backlash shows two things. One, what a mind-bending, allconsuming, perception-warping world influencing is. Two, there’s also something dangerous about our backlash to it.
Firstly, as an ex-influencer of sorts myself, I can tell you that there’s nothing that screws you up more than a small amount of Insta-fame. I’m not even really talking about the incessant misery of constant content creation, that whirlpool which 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.
The real danger of microfame is that . . . it utterly distorts your sense of selfimportance.