Are you curious about how social media content creators navigate the challenges and opportunities of platform-dependent work? Do you want to know what goes into writing and publishing an academic monograph about influencer industries and culture? We are delighted to invite you to a virtual authors roundtable, where the wonderful Brooke Erin Duffy, Sophie Bishop and Angèle Christin will be in conversation about their eagerly awaited upcoming books!

We’ll hear about each of these fascinating projects and discuss the many productive points of overlap between them, including how each author approached this volatile and ever-changing topic to come to their rich accounts of creator labour, cultures and industries. We’ll also peak behind the curtain into the mechanics of writing an academic monograph: starting with the proposal and contract stage, through those painful writing hurdles, right up to publication day. This will be followed by an audience Q&A. As usual, our events are designed to be interactive and generative of ideas and conversation, so we hope you'll come with questions! The event will be chaired by The Digital Ethnography Collective Co-Founder Zoë Glatt and moderated by Sarah Edwards (UW-Madison).

BOOK BLURBS

Influencer Creep, Sophie Bishop (under contract, University of California Press)

This book uncovers influencer culture as a hypocentre of pressures to be ‘always on’, share more ‘authentically’ and to be responsive to ‘black boxed’ algorithmic whims. Through reviewing the political economy of influencer cultures, I show how influencers and intermediaries such as platforms, talent managers and brands contributed to foundational influencer practices, conventions, and experiences. Now, pressures and practices originated with influencer economies are central to the lives of creative workers such as artists and makers. Influencer creep thus helps us understand how platform power users’ dynamics have informed participation and representation within culture, as social media platforms become increasingly central to the professional and personal lives of creative workers, and beyond. Influencer creep reveals important context for contemporary cultural lives and experiences of labour, showing how platformised promotional culture has informed responses to hierarchies of (in)visibility along the lines of class, gender and race.

The Visibility Bind: Platforms, Power, and Precarity in the Creator Economy, Brooke Erin Duffy (under contract, Chicago University Press)

With much of the tech sector reeling from layoffs and financial strife, platform companies—from Meta and YouTube to TikTok and Twitch—are doubling down on their idealistic framing of the digital “Creator Economy.” But the image of social media as an entrepreneurial Promised Land is belied by the precarious, even perilous realities of platform-dependent labor. Drawing upon more than 80 interviews with digital content creators, influencers, and streamers, I illuminate the source of their plight: a platformed visibility bind. In a labor market where algorithms are considered key arbiters of success—and failure—creators struggle to defy the imminent threat of invisibility. But they must also reckon with the risks of hypervisibility, from burnout and cultural appropriation to trolling and targeted harassment. The conditions and consequences of this bind are amplified for marginalized creators—including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community. A necessary rejoinder to creator economy boosterism, The Visibility Bind disentangles the promises from the precarities of the new world of creative work. And while the book foregrounds the experiences of social media creators, it has lessons for anyone roused to comply with the siren song to “put yourself out there.”

Follow Me: Influencers, Platforms, and the Rise of the Follower Economy, Angèle Christin (under contract, Chicago University Press)

Existing research on social media platforms often emphasizes the role of algorithmic sorting and platform failure to explain the proliferation of misinformation and hate speech online. In this project, I switch the focus from distribution dynamics to the social contexts of production to understand where problematic content comes from. Drawing on interviews and observations with social media influencers and marketers, I find that social media platforms and brands create precarious structures and problematic incentives for individuals seeking to make a living from their online production. Over time, many influencers end up engaging in drama—highly publicized interpersonal conflicts—or producing extreme and inflammatory content in an attempt to cement the loyalty of online followers. I analyze these dynamics as part of the rise of a follower economy that is reshaping many domains of public debate. I conclude by discussing the relevance of this framework for the study of the online public sphere more broadly.

AUTHOR BIOS

Sophie Bishop is an Associate Professor in Media and Communications at the University of Leeds. Her research focuses on promotion within platformization, and has been published in journals such as Social Media + Society, New Media & Society and the Sociological Review. Sophie was Specialist Advisor to the UK Parliamentary Inquiry into Influencer Culture and has contributed to EU Policy on the impact of influencers on advertising.

Brooke Erin Duffy, Ph.D., is a social media researcher, author, and Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at Cornell University. Her books include (Not) Getting Paid to Do What You Love: Gender, Social Media, and Aspirational Work (Yale University Press, 2017)—which was recognized as one of the "Top Tech Books of 2017” by Wired—and Platforms and Cultural Production, with Thomas Poell and David Nieborg (Polity, 2021).

Angèle Christin is an associate professor of Communication and the faculty director of the Digital Civil Society Lab at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices.