Managing our publics like pros

In the world of mutual influence in which technologies and humans exist, are our selves changing? It would certainly appear so in an online search. Identity construction online is sophisticated and constant; not just a full-time job but an activity occupying all hours of our lives.

The need to manage our identities is a new phenomenon - right? Well, mostly. One culture that has been dealing with context collapse as an essential part of their work and lives is celebrity culture. And an increasingly popular strategy for pleasing multiple audiences in various contexts is to post like a celebrity.

Enter the phenomenon of microcelebrity, a way of presenting yourself like a celebrity: setting up your profile and "brand" online, gaining followers, and revealing things about yourself in strategic and controlled ways. The goal of microcelebrity is to make your brand - the marketing of yourself - valuable. The entire system around microcelebrity is called "the attention economy," because with so much information out their vying for people's attention, anything people choose to look at is perceived as more valuable, including ourselves. Microcelebrity leads social media users like you and I to apply marketing perspectives to our own identities.

Microcelebrity is big business. It can make ordinary people famous, as when Youtubers can become household names with lucrative marketing contracts. But more often, microcelebrity helps ordinary users participate in social media culture while managing their contexts with polish. We understand increasingly that our social media presences are like art exhibits of ourselves, and we spend extra time in curating them.

Social media has accelerated the demotic turn in celebrity. Many people quote Andy Warhol's comment in the past that each person, no matter how ordinary, would have 15 minutes of fame. Today in technologically connected societies, it is a lifetime of potential discovery by audiences. High- profile celebrities perform the masses for the masses. And you all are superstars, to at least a small public.

Conclusion

Why is it important to know ourselves in order to understand social media? I called this book Humans are Social Media because the development of social media culture, including norms and technological affordances, is wrapped up in you, and me, and other humans. And we are also wrapped up in that culture; as we shape it, it shapes us.

I've tried to show the ways the partnership between social media technologies and human culture play out in this book. We began with the reverberations of this partnership on identity. We examined our society's communication practices informing early social media technologies. We looked at how human-created algorithms bounce against human behaviors, reinforcing them but also sometimes being rejected by them. We learned about the ways humans have learned to use social technologies to seek what we want through online activism, branding, and lying. And we looked at the ways our bodies and needs for love play out in the digital landscape, performing new relationships and spectacular selves.

I hope this book has helped you to understand how important your role is as a human in a technological revolution.

And I hope that you will share what you've learned.

microcelebrity

A way of presenting yourself like a celebrity: setting up your profile and "brand" online, gaining followers, and revealing things about yourself in strategic and controlled ways.

"the demotic turn" in celebrity culture

Graeme Turner's term for the leveling of the everyday toward celebrity culture and vice versa (Understanding Celebrity, 2004)

Did you get all that?

A few parting questions...

Which are true about microcelebrity?

1. Ordinary people build profiles and market them
2. The goal of microcelebrity is to gain views in the attention economy
3. Microcelebrity is part of the "demotic turn" in celebrity in which the famous is presented as more ordinary and the ordinary is presented as more famous
4. All of the above
5. A and B only

Thank you for reading and interacting with this book! What did you find most useful? What do you wish I had discussed but I didn't?

What do you believe should have been discussed in this book that was not?

Please indicate which best describes you.

1. I am a student in one of Professor Daly's courses.
2. I am a student of an Instructor other than Professor Daly.
3. I am an instructor using this book to teach my class.
4. Other