Ex-Google employee Anna Hyclak wrote an interesting piece of her vision of where the Influencer Culture is going and we couldn’t agree more.
The End of Influencer Culture
She talks about Russian-born Instagram influencer Kris Schatzel who went viral after video footage of her posing for a photo shoot at a Black Lives Matter protest. “The video, which shows Kris fixing her outfit and hair to get the perfect photo while blocking actual protesters from marching, represented everything that people love to hate about influencer culture: the unabashed materialism, the clueless narcissism, the focus on image over substance.”
Not to mention the fact that the influencer industry is dominated by thin, conventionally attractive white women, many of whom have used FaceTune and plastic surgery to create “a look of rootless exoticism,” as Jia Tolentino described it in her brilliant New Yorker article on “Instagram face.”
She mentioned Summer Dawn (@summer.dawn), an influencer primarily known for “bathfluencing” who posted about defunding the police on Instagram — then was called out for gratuitously using the n-word in multiple tweets from 2012.
Update: It seems that Summer went private after all the backlash she’s been receiving. (an influencer private – Interesting…)
A lot of backlash for influencers right now… Be sure to read her piece at medium.com
Digg Deeper:
Could the Coronavirus Kill Influencer Culture? | Wired
Influencers lose their gloss | Financial Times
Is This the End of Influencing as We Knew It? | Vanity Fair
Kylie Jenner and the end of the Instagram influencer business …| NY Post