Aiming for the Moon
Aiming for the Moon
120. The Influencer Industry - The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media: Dr. Emily Hund (Author of "The Influencer Industry")
“Authenticity” has become an economic token on social media. And, not in a metaphorical way. This has led to people becoming brands. The so-called “influencer” is an icon of an industry not yet recognized or respected by society at large.
This new industry is composed of a digital labor force whose livelihoods are at the whims of all-powerful, ever-changing algorithms. In this episode, Dr. Emily Hund, the author of The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2023), explains the rise of this new economy and why it should be recognized and legitimized by the public.
Topics:
- How did this “branded” culture develop?
- What is an “influencer?”
- The Narrative of Self-sufficiency: Are you really self-sufficient if you are an influencer?
- "Authenticity" on Social Media - is it really authentic?
- Legitimizing the "Influencer Industry"
- "What books have had an impact on you?"
- "What advice do you have for teenagers?"
Bio:
Emily Hund, PhD, is the author of the book, The Influencer Industry: The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media (Princeton University Press, 2023). She writes, speaks, and consults on topics related to influencers, the reshaping of cultural industries, and the digital labor force. Early in her career, she worked as a magazine writer and social media editor, and earned degrees in journalism and sociology from Penn State University.
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The so-called influencer is an icon of an industry not yet recognized or respected by society at large. This new industry is composed of a digital labor force whose livelihoods are at the whims of all-powerful and ever-changing algorithms. This is the Aiming for the Moon podcast and I'm your host, taylor Bledsoe. On this podcast, I interview interesting people from a teenage perspective. In this episode, dr Emily Hund, the author of the Influencer Industry the Quest for Authenticity in Social Media, princeton University Press 2023, explains the rise of this new economy and why it should be recognized and legitimized by the public. If you like what you hear today, please rate the podcast and subscribe. You can follow us at aiming the number for moon on all the socials to stay up to date on podcast news and episodes. To date on podcast news and episodes. Check out the episode notes for Dr Hun's full bio, as well as links to the influencer industry, our website AimingForTheMooncom and our podcast sub-stag. Lessons From Interesting People which, as of this recording date, should have a new post out soon about the dangers of abstracting individuals in a divided society. A conversation connecting social media and Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, who proposed a pathway forward when similar times hit 1800s Russia. All right with that sit back, relax and listen in. Thanks again to Paxton Page for this incredible music. Well, thank you so much, dr Hund, for coming on the podcast. It's great to have you here. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so you're the author of the book the Influencer Industry the Quest for Authenticity on Social Media, and it's a huge topic, as, of course, everyone has social media for the most part, so they're constantly seeing these feeds. We get a lot of our political news, we get a lot of our cultural news, we get a lot of our movie news all from social media. And of course, we have all these people there who we look to and we're like huh, they seem to have a very idealized life. They're always posting about X, y and Z, whether it's travel, whether it's shopping, just stuff like that. They're these very branded people. So could you talk a bit about what we see and how that industry kind of developed?
Speaker 2:Sure.
Speaker 2:So, yeah, something that I think is it's kind of a basic fact, but it bears repeating, is that the influencers that we encounter on social media are there strategically and there is a whole world behind what they are posting.
Speaker 2:And so I think there's a tendency for followers myself included sometimes, you know, when you're just scrolling through your feeds, you kind of take what you see at face value sometimes and just sort of assume like, oh, you know, this person is on this trip and they're having a blast, or you know, this person you know has all these new clothes or makeup or whatever, and you just kind of take it and keep scrolling. But the reality is that there is a large and sophisticated industry behind these posts that we see in our feeds, and while there is like a popular narrative that influencers are like doing what they love and they're there because they're really passionate about their topics and it's just kind of like, you know, fun and all of that, the reality is, you know, couldn't really be further from the truth there is a lot of strategy and planning that goes behind it. There's a ton of work required to become an influencer that you know has a large and engaged audience, and so the world is a lot more complicated than it appears.
Speaker 1:So kind of to define our terms off the bat here, when you say influencer, what exactly do you mean, cause there are a variety of different, um, I guess, people of influence on the internet. But when you say the word influencer, specifically, what do you mean?
Speaker 2:I am talking about people who are creating content, uh, for social media with the express goal of building an audience and making money or getting some sort of material gain from doing so. A few years ago, I think my definition was a little bit more straightforward. It was people who are creating personal brands on social media and working with other brands to make money. But in the last 4 or 5 years the landscape has gotten a lot more complex and there has also been. It just continues to grow.
Speaker 2:There are more and more people who are aspiring to be influencers, or are kind of on that bottom rung, if you will, of maybe getting some free product but they're not actually getting paid in cash. Or maybe they're getting a little bit of material, something, in return. It's not an income by any means, and I think there there are a lot of people who are at that sort of bottom of the pyramid, um, and so I've sort of loosened up my definition of it to encapsulate these people who are um, who are doing the work of influencing but maybe not getting the returns yet. Um and um, and also the people who are, you know, taking advantage of newer platforms like TikTok and things like that, which you know, work a little bit differently, and so it's kind of more likely that people are sort of again doing this work of branding themselves and creating content, seeking an audience but not necessarily getting the returns.
Speaker 1:Yeah, throughout my generation. Of course, I have a lot of friends and other people who are trying to build their careers on social media, and then blogging and, of course, podcasting with myself and some of my other friends, and so, yeah, there's this idea of you talk about this in your book kind of wanting to individualize your career, not tie it to an institution or other people. You want to be self-sufficient. I am curious, though are you really self-sufficient if you have an internet platform of some sort, because it seems to me that you're tied to these big algorithms You're tied to if your website is set up by Squarespace, squarespace may be in there the way they change their systems. So is this fake individualism? Is this fake autonomy? What exactly are we seeing here?
Speaker 2:It is sort of false autonomy. So that is something that you know. Going back to, how did this industry even come about? So it began about 15 or so years ago, against a really particular historical backdrop. So we had the rise of these new social media platforms, which were really novel at the time Facebook and Twitter, youtube, tumblr they were all new. We as a society hadn't become cynical about them yet as many of us have at this point. It was really exciting and they were, you know, claiming. These platforms were saying you know, we're gonna, we offer a voice to everyone, we're going to democratize culture. You can take control of you know your identity, your job, all of these things.
Speaker 2:There was a lot of like just big optimism about these platforms and at the same time, there was the, the economic crisis, you know, the great recession of 2008, 2009,. Millions of people were losing their jobs. People were just losing faith in the establishment because of these historic job losses, and this sort of lack of faith in institutions had already sort of been growing for years. You know people sort of, you know rising levels of distrust in, you know, government, media, religion, these sort of pillars of society, and so in this moment it's there. It's like, you know, sort of a perfect storm of events where it's like, oh, let's all rush to these platforms and like we can rely on ourselves, we're going to, you know, rebuild culture and, you know, connect to, you know, the world and all of this stuff. And so there has always been that sort of narrative of relying on yourself, taking control of yourself and your career and that sort of thing when we're talking about influencers. But that has really always been false and is only becoming more false as the years go on.
Speaker 2:Influencers are definitely so they. They are people who essentially have to start their own business. And so, in that regard, you know, you can say, you know, you are kind of in charge, you have, you know you have a level of control that you might not as, like, an entry level employee at a major corporation or something like that. But you are not beholden to yourself, you are beholden to your audiences, the advertisers, the brands that you're hoping to work with or that you already work with, because none of those relationships are guaranteed. And even if you've had one good deal, that doesn't mean that the deal is going to continue or that you're going to continue getting new deals with new brands, and so you're beholden to the advertisers, and then, of course, you're at the mercy of these major platforms that you are using to carry out your work.
Speaker 2:So whenever there is a change to the algorithm, a new feature rolls out, um, some sort of controversy. You know what, whatever you get kind of pulled along, and you have to. You know, influencers have to spend a lot of time and energy kind of trying to stay abreast of these changes, and it's a lot of work because the platforms aren't transparent, you know, they don't give you a warning. Usually when they are changing, you know the type of content that they're privileging in people's feeds and you, you know you influencers wake up and see that their engagement has tanked or whatever, and then they have to try to figure out why. And and then, and sometimes it's like these sort of wholesale, like changes to to the industry, like when, you know, instagram started privileging video because they were trying to compete with TikTok.
Speaker 2:That was like a massive change for influencers who had, you know, built their followings on Instagram largely through static images. And now it's like, oh, I have to be like a video director and I have to like star in videos now, and that's like a huge. It's like, okay, you have to learn an entirely new skill set and you have to completely reorient your workday. So yeah, as an influencer, you are very much beholden to other people. But and this kind of goes along with, you know, in, I think, in American society especially, we kind of love the myth of like this solo creative genius or, you know, solo entrepreneur who you know did it on their own and charted a path and, and you know, grabbed life by the horns or whatever, and was really successful. But that is rarely the truth. You know. There is almost always people behind the scenes who helped that person and that is, or shaped what that person was doing. And that is very much the case with influencers as well.
Speaker 1:Another aspect of this that we often talk about, or at least we often see, is the personal branding aspect, and so it's this idea of being authentic, but it's authentic to the point that people want to see. So you don't want to be too authentic because that might not sell or you want to just kind of measure it and dial it to your demographics and stuff like that. So it almost is this weird. Is it really authentic to actually strive for authenticity on social media as it's defined? Could you discuss kind of, why is that so important to people?
Speaker 2:Why is that so important to people? Yeah, authenticity has always been like the juice that keeps this industry going. Again, there are a lot of like intersecting reasons for this that I get into in the book. But first is authenticity has always been like a really salient concept, especially in Western cultures. Really salient concept, and especially in Western, you know, cultures, it's something that people, you know, philosophers and regular people have like, have talked about for centuries, and it's also something that has been leveraged strategically by government and media, you know, who are trying to persuade people of a message. It's been, it's been leveraged in this way for at least 100, 150 years. So people working in the sort of media industries have always known that cultivating a sense of authenticity around your message, you know, can make your message more impactful, more powerful. And so there's that piece of it, there's that sort of historical media piece.
Speaker 2:There's also this, the piece of the story of how the industry, the influencer industry, came to be, which was this, this sort of first generation of influencers who were, you know, taking up these platforms and building these major audiences. You know, in the first decade of the 2000s, call it, a lot of them did kind of fall into it because it wasn't an established career already. And so when they were telling their audiences like, oh my gosh, like like I, you know, I just got approached by um, you know, dove and I'm going to do this sponsored content, uh, about soap, like how cool is that, I can, I'm actually able to, um, you know, fund my, my work, that I'm doing here. And you know that that sort of um, that sort of surprised energy around these early sponsored posts that bolstered the sort of authenticity of the field, of all of these early influencers, kind of saying, look, I didn't go into this for the money, but now the money's coming, isn't that exciting. And that really sort of uh, helped authenticity sort of entrench itself further and like in this industry as being like the thing that people talked about and cultivated and the thing that sort of um, the better they could perform authenticity, the the more they were able to sort of rationalize earning money for it. And so even though now, you know, in the over the last 10, 15 years, people are going into the influencer industry with a strategic mindset, you know they're not just falling into it and saying, oh, wow, how amazing is this. That narrative has been really consistent of that these are people who are just like being themselves and over the years it has become, you know what I, what I argue in the book is like an industrial construction or it's an industrial production.
Speaker 2:Authenticity is something that influencers now have to perform, because once advertisers got involved, which was pretty early on, they got involved because influencers had this seemingly authentic connection with their audiences and they were people who were sort of talking about things in a way that, you know, more traditional media and advertising did not. That was their appeal, um, but once it, once that becomes the commodity, then you have to commodify it, um, you have to make it something that's predictable, something that can be assigned financial value, and it is also something that is shaped by, you know, the changing technologies that govern the influencer space. And so, while many influencers that I interview have interviewed over the years, you know, expressed like, expressed a genuine desire to like, not lie necessarily and I should say this certainly isn't true for all influencers. You know some people are lying, but as far as my, my interviewees, like they, you know most of them say like, I didn't go into this to to lie Like I, really I don't want to lie, I want to be myself, but at the same time, I can't just like say whatever I want, you know, and I can't just partner with whatever brand I want or just do whatever occurs to me on any given day.
Speaker 2:I have to remain brand safe, which means I have to post content that doesn't offend brands and makes me look appealing to them. As a know I'm not going to share personal things that I don't want to share, and I have to also create the types of content you know, like the video versus the image, versus using a filter, do it. You know all of these things participating in you know various trends, all these things you know. They say, like I have to do all these things to perform my authenticity in a way that keeps the audiences coming and thus keeps the advertisers interested.
Speaker 1:It's interesting because it's not like in some cultures this idea is kind of like not demonized, but it's like look down upon, like, oh, you're just shifting in the sways of whatever's popular or something like that. But I know, it's like down upon, like oh, you're just shifting in the sways of whatever's popular or something like that. But you know, it's like, it's a legitimate career. They're making money and they have a lifestyle off of it. In like in another realm of their lives. They might have been an office worker or someone who's been a part of a big corporation, but no, these people have their own streams of income from these various brands and things. So it is a legitimate career. They are really entrepreneurs. But it is interesting that it's like it's this weird place that they're caught in. It's like this how do you put yourself on a platform but still be yourself and make money from it?
Speaker 2:And it's yeah, yeah, I mean I would. I would respond to that by saying it is a career and I want to. It needs to be more legitimized. So right now the industry is kind of um, kind of wide open, and so anyone can. Can, you know, start, you know, posting to their platform of choice and try to make it as an influencer, and you know, most of these people will fail, of course, but but anyone can try and also anyone can sort of exploit these features of the industrialized performance, of authenticity. You know you can kind of see what other people are doing kind of authenticity. You know you can kind of see what other people are doing kind of, you know, copy, copy their sort of modes of expressing themselves. You can even, you know there are people out there who will like pretend to have brand deals when they don't, or, you know, pretend to be going on a trip to this location or going to this restaurant or whatever, or having this behind the scenes access in some way that they, that they don't actually have, and and. So that is one issue. And then, on the flip side, within these major influencer marketing agencies, within the influencer teams at major brands, there is discrimination that happens.
Speaker 2:There are a lot of different issues that also sort of shape, you know, lead the industry in particular directions. On the financial side of things, there are these, you know, these influencer marketplaces where you know you can like sign up, say, like I'm, I'm so and so I'm, these are my, you know I'm, these are the things that I'm interested in, here's my accounts, blah, blah, blah. And then brands use these marketplaces to, like, you know, search and turn up influencers that they might want to work with and and that sort of thing. Um, and these marketplaces are also, like, really open for, like X, for exploitation, you know, both by um brands or by other groups who are trying to get their messages out there and looking to, um, you know, sort of mobilize, like people to to spread their messages, and by um influencers who may maybe, like aren't actually, don't actually have an audience or aren't actually, you know, doing their work in a, in an above board way, um, to sort of exploit these brand opportunities.
Speaker 2:So there are a lot of, uh, weak spots in this industry and there's also not a lot of public understanding about the industry and about, like, about what goes on behind the scenes, what really is the goal of, you know influencer marketing, of influencer marketing, that sort of thing.
Speaker 2:And so I think we are at a place where the people working in the industry, people working at brands, at marketing firms and established influencers, really have a responsibility to further professionalize the space and turn it into a more legitimate industry, develop, you know, internal codes of conduct and ethics and oversight and you know all of these things to get it to a place where there is less A fraud I suppose it would be the word and exploitation in the space and where the public is also a little bit better educated about this content, so that so that you know people who are encountering this content, you know can, can evaluate it. You know, like we have gotten to a place with other things you know, like ads on television. You know we understand what we're encountering when we see those now, but we didn't a hundred, or not a hundred, but you know we didn't 75 years ago, and so we need to get to a place where there's better understanding and better consistency with the, with the industry.
Speaker 1:In some ways making it more authentic by showing behind the scenes what's really happening and then like not allowing outright fraud, for instance, or stuff like that.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean, authenticity is a slippery concept and it's like in one hand you could say, like if that makes it more authentic. On the other hand, you might say like that we have to just accept that it will never be authentic. But I guess that's a matter of opinion.
Speaker 1:Yeah, Depending on the way it goes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, Well, kind of wrapping up with our last two questions, definitely go check out the book for more explorations of this, of these topics. They're fascinating, they're very relevant Funny to use that term in a influencer conversation. But what books have had an impact on you? This is a hard question to answer because so many books have left an imprint on me or shaped me in some way. Letters to a Young Poet, which I read as an older teenager, and it's just something that really resonated with me at the time because of, even if you don't aspire to uh, you know a creative life, it has still really important messages about trying to chart a path that is as free from the judgment of others as it can be. Um and um can be and sort of adhering to what you know to be true and the importance of having solitude and time to reflect and things like that. And that's a book that has just stayed with me and I still return to it once in a while and there's always something sort of new to discover in that.
Speaker 2:More practically speaking, on the professional side of things, alice Marwick's book Status Update was an important book for me professionally because it came out at a time when I was just starting to apply to graduate school programs and I knew that I was interested in studying social media. This was over 10 years ago and so this was a time where social media was still, you know, considered sort of a new frontier and I had been looking at sociology programs initially and finding that sociology as a discipline was not really that excited about media at that time and I was kind of wondering like where I know there's a path here, but I don't know where it is or what it's going to look like. And when I read that book, that really helped me feel confident that there was a path for me professionally pursuing research of social media, and that you could write, you know, a book that was interesting and accessible and um helped people understand, you know, the inner workings of technology. Um, in some way, um. And then another book, uh, or series of books that came to mind um is um again sort of going back to the personal end of thing is Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan Quartet, which has developed such a rabid global fan base over the years, and I kind of just fell into the books though several years ago and was just totally sucked into them and they just really touched me, and in a really deep way.
Speaker 2:I have an early memory of my great grandmother telling me in her kitchen I'm a Napolitan and you're a Napolitan, and that really stuck with me as a young child, when you are still, you know, really just developing who you are, and my family always sort of cultivated a connection between us, who were, you know, born and raised in the United States, and the world that they left behind. And reading those books was just, they just really moved me because they're so beautifully detailed and just so beautifully written and they feel they describe a world that is, it feels familiar to me in some ways, but it's also very, very distant from my reality and from the time period that I'm living in, and it just was a beautiful, heartbreaking story to get lost in and also really made me feel sort of connected to my own family's journey in a new way, and the TV show that they have made out of it is actually very good as well. But read the books first.
Speaker 1:Yeah, those are all really interesting. I love when people tie like books that had a personal impact on them and in their career. Then also with the last book, how it kind of ties you into your family history and giving you perspective on where your family went from there. Yeah it's really unique.
Speaker 2:The last one Well, I was going to say, I think, as you get older. I mean, there's so much talk about work-life balance and work-life separation and all these things, and you know, like you are yourself, you know when you're working or when you're not, and so all these things do tie together and make you who you are.
Speaker 1:So yeah, yeah. What advice do you have for teenagers?
Speaker 2:kind of off of that Hang out with your friends, listen to music and get to know yourself. That is the greatest gift that that you can give yourself is taking the time to listen to your instincts, listen to the things that go off in your head, or something that you really like or you don't like, or you want to do or you are not comfortable doing. Listen to yourself and honor and honor that and, um, and yeah, don't be afraid to just stand. You know, develop your beliefs and and stand firm in them well.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, dr hund, for coming on the podcast. I really enjoyed our conversation. We talked about the influencer industry, of course, how it's become an industry, and then authenticity, as well as how did it get started and, yeah, all these other nooks and crannies that we explored throughout the interview. Again, thanks so much for coming on Thank you.
