Article: “Good Vibes: The Complex Work of Social Media Influencers in a Pandemic”

What kind of work is authentically essential? In the midst of a global pandemic, Americans have been introduced to new classifications of some work as essential. Almost as quickly as we adopted this new terminology to refer to the laborers who must leave their homes to care for others—the nurses, doctors, grocery store clerks, and janitorial staff —we began to publicly proclaim our support and gratitude for their essential work. Social media platforms in the USA and Europe have been an important part of this process, providing a place where millions of people have added hashtags like #thankyouhealthcareworkers and #stayhomesavelives to posts to encourage people to stay home so as to not overwhelm hospitals and healthcare workers. As professionals like hospital staff, postal workers, and gig economy laborers take on personal, bodily risks for the benefit of the social body, they are clearly and undeniably deserving of public gratitude and celebration.

The Non-Essential Workers

Yet as new categories of laborers are classified as essential, this prompts a related question: Who are the non-essential workers? How does the value of their labor shift in a moment of crisis? How are they responding to these shifts?

I study a group of people who do something that many others do not consider to be work at all: Instagram influencers. Influencer is a broad term, but it is often used to refer to young women, frequently of color, who promote products and services to large audiences on social media. Influencers can have hundreds of thousands of followers, not always on the basis of talent or skills external to Instagram, but as a direct result of their ability to create likable, attractive, and enviable content. Research on social media users with over 100,000 followers has suggested that “they imagined their audience as a fan base or community with whom they could connect or manage” (Marwick and Boyd 2011, 120). Influencers continually manage their social media output in line with the expectations of their audiences (both followers and corporate sponsors), as their income and professional identity require ongoing work of self-representation through images and text. One of the most crucial of these expectations is “authenticity,” or the perceived “realness” of an influencer. When produced successfully, authenticity blends desire and intimacy into a hybrid commodity-image composed of components of the influencer’s private life.