Crystal Abidin

“Aren’t These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online?”: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity

Taking seriously the global trend of selfies becoming marketable and entangled in ecologies of commerce, this article looks at Influencers who have emerged as (semi-)professional selfie-producers and for whom taking selfies is a purposively commercial, thoughtful, and subversive endeavor. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and grounded theory analysis, I examine Influencers’ engagements with selfies on Instagram and their appropriations of selfies as salable objects, as tacit labor, and as an expression of contrived authenticity and reflexivity. Through these practices, Influencers achieve “subversive frivolity,” which I define as the under-visibilized and under-estimated generative power of an object or practice arising from its (populist) discursive framing as marginal, inconsequential, and unproductive.

#familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor:

Following in the celebrity trajectory of mommy bloggers, global micro-microcelebrities, and reality TV families, family Influencers on social media are one genre of microcelebrity for whom the “anchor” content in which they demonstrate their creative talents, such as producing musical covers or comedy sketches, is a highly profitable endeavor. Yet, this commerce is sustained by an undercurrent of “filler” content wherein everyday routines of domestic life are shared with followers as a form of “calibrated amateurism.” Calibrated amateurism is a practice and aesthetic in which actors in an attention economy labor specifically over crafting contrived authenticity that portrays the raw aesthetic of an amateur, whether or not they really are amateurs by status or practice, by relying on the performance ecology of appropriate platforms, affordances, tools, cultural vernacular, and social capital. In this article, I consider the anatomy of calibrated amateurism, and how this practice relates to follower engagement and responses. While some follower responses have highlighted concerns over the children’s well-being, a vast majority overtly signal their love, support, and even envy toward such parenting. I draw on ethnographically informed content analysis of two group of family Influencers on social media to illustrate the enactment and value of calibrated amateurism in an increasingly saturated ecology and, investigate how such parents justify the digital labor in which their children partake to produce viable narratives of domestic life.

Introduction to the Social Media + Society Special Issue on Selfies: Me-diated Inter-faces

This introduction to the special issue entitled Me-diated Inter-faces begins by bringing into question the concept of positioning: what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction provides both critical and creative in-roads for thinking and re-thinking digital self-images shared on social media. Given the constantly changing nature of social media, this paper is a call to researchers of social media to not fall prey to the ossification of our current positions since theorizing the “social” in social media means always at once theorizing the body. As such this intro offers numerous and diverse perspectives on the body that might inform emerging thoughts on the socially media body. The introduction then provides an overview of the papers in this special issue and concludes by offering openings and ruptures for further discussion, rather than closure of conclusions.

Net Idols and Beauty Bloggers’ Negotiations of Race, Commerce, and Cultural Customs: Emergent Microcelebrity Genres in Thailand: Emergent Microcelebrity Genres in Thailand

Abstract Around the mid-2000s, the first wave of young Thai women who attained fame organically on the internet emerged when their photos and profiles were widely shared by friends and fans in web communities and discussion forums. Comprising mainly of students, these women were known as “net idols” and celebrated primarily for their looks, as online conversations focused on their beauty, cosmetic and dressing skills, and overall pleasant appearance. Since then, some of these net idols have parlayed their online popularity into commercial exchanges and partnerships by advertising for clients, evolving into a commercial form of microcelebrity known as “influencers” (Abidin, 2016), while still others progressed into different forms of internet celebrity confined only to online fame as social capital without further tangible returns. In this chapter, we review the conceptual history of net idols and a subset of influencers known as “beauty bloggers” in Thailand, drawing on observations and content analyses of net idols’ Instagram posts, beauty bloggers’ Facebook posts, conversations from selected discussion boards, and popular sentiment about these internet celebrities in tabloids and online websites. Most of the content is originally in Thai and translated by the first author.

Sex Bait: Sex Talk on Commercial Blogs as Informal Sexuality Education

Institutionalized sexuality education in Singapore undertakes a conservative, medicalized approach that preaches abstinence, premised on promoting healthy (heterosexual) relationships between married couples for reproduction purposes to uphold a stable family unit. While the state assigns parents, the school, students, and the community as stakeholders in maintaining a comprehensive sexuality education, young people are increasingly turning to commercial bloggers who are trendy and influential on the Internet for firsthand “lifestyle” information and advice. In response, some bloggers have innovatively marketed sex and sexuality-related products and services to lure in viewers. Through ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter examines commercial bloggers’ use of “sex bait” as an informal form of sexuality education, disseminating personal and endorsed messages through shock and allure, pedantic consumption, and personal illustrations.

Entrepreneurial selves, feminine corporeality and lifestyle blogging in Singapore

The making of the entrepreneurial self is a dominant trope of contemporary media culture, and a multitude of media formats across divergent national contexts showcase the contemporary obsession wit ...

My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues

ABSTRACT In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, students create an inverse attention economy of competitive one-downmanship, where the goal is to display humorous failure instead of perfect appearance. Our analysis shows that students use humour to express, share, and commiserate over daily struggles, but also that the problems related to work/study balance and mental health, are experienced as a persistent feature of student living. We also analyse limitations of meme-based publics, emphasizing processes of inclusion and exclusion through specific vernaculars of visual and discursive humour where issues related to gender, race, orientation, class, and ability are sidelined in favour of relatable humour.

Book review: Marcel Danesi, The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the InternetDanesiMarcel, The Semiotics of Emoji: The Rise of Visual Language in the Age of the Internet, London and New York: Bloomsbury, 2017; viii + 197 pp., AU

video material into the analysis. Consequently, the complexity of the interaction is only partly explored, as the analyses remain verbatim structural analyses of turntaking sequences. That said, the volume offers interesting and different perspectives on how interaction is structured and managed through embodied negotiations. The true value of the volume lies in its three-dimensional focus on different but interrelated contexts in and around the surgical setting: the consultation, the operating theatre and the aftermath. Finally, what makes Communication important is its detailed analyses, which provide a valid basis for discussing what has been perceived as tacit understandings of surgical interactions.

27.99 (pbk), ISBN 9781474281980.

Taking Singaporean Member of Parliament (MP) Baey Yam Keng as a case study, this chapter analyses how charismatic engagement can be mediated through social media and selfie tropes. In the wake of o ...