When we find words being used in a novel way, our countenances tend to stiffen. What’s going on here? Is this a euphemism? Is there a hidden agenda here?
Such is unquestionably the case of the new/old word influencer. At first glance, it looks harmless and insignificant, a lazy and imprecise way of designating someone as influential. But the word’s use as a noun is the key to what is different and new about it. And much as I dislike the word, and dislike the phenomenon it describes, necessity seems to have dictated that such a word be created.
The necessity to which I refer, the raison d’être of influencer, is the rise of social media, the ever more pervasive and enveloping interactive networks made possible by the Internet—X (the social networking service formerly known as Twitter), Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, TikTok, Snapchat, et alia, ad infinitum—into which and through which so much of our lives are now being poured. This is not the place to evaluate the pluses and minuses of these arrangements, except to point out that they have destabilized, if not demolished, all the conventional means by which we have determined what counts as an authoritative view of a subject. The Wikipedia entry for social media says it all in one dry sentence: “Social media can also be used to read or share news, whether it is true or false.” That the same can be said of open-sourced Wikipedia itself does not detract from the truth of this particular statement.
It has not helped matters that the rise of social media has coincided with a serious decline in the general public’s faith in experts and other trusted sources of objective knowledge—a term we are now too often tempted to put between scare quotes. The debacle of the public health establishment’s response to the COVID pandemic is only the most recent of blows to our confidence in the competence and disinterestedness of our accredited experts. One could cite a great many more examples, including the declining status of my own demimonde, the world of higher education.
So what to believe? And whom to believe? In the night all cows are black, and in the social media age, all opinions become equal. People will turn to whatever sources they trust, for reasons both good and bad, the only stipulation being that these sources be easily available online. And thus enter the influencers, and the need for a word to describe them.
A recent study by the Reuters Institute at the University of Oxford found that 55 percent of TikTok and Snapchat users, and 52 percent of Instagram users, get their news from influencers, rather than conventional news sources. The numbers are less startling for older platforms such as X and Facebook, but the figures for general distrust of the news media—32 percent in the United States—are alarming enough.
In the newspaper era now passing, if not already past, figures like Walter Lippmann, Anthony Lewis, A.M. Rosenthal, Meg Greenfield, George F. Will, and Joseph Alsop were called “opinion leaders,” because they not only had access to large audiences but also were thought to be intelligent, informed, broadly well educated, and well acquainted with the various aspects of our political and cultural life. They were not infallible, and they could be opinionated, but they had authority. Their readers learned to trust them not because they were pretty faces or led enviable lives but because their opinions were reliably thoughtful and usually persuasive.
Influencers have some of the same characteristics, but there are two big differences. The term influencer is entirely functionalist and results oriented. There is no credentialed baseline of presumed or demonstrated authority. You don’t need a degree; you don’t even have to have graduated from high school. You become an influencer not because you know anything, or are accredited in any way, but solely on the basis of your demonstrable influence, the size of the audience you are able to gather around you and hang on to—in other words, your ability to carry out the function of influencing. As that audience grows and comes to believe that you know what you are talking about, it follows you and follows your instructions. By their fruits ye shall know them, and the influencers’ fruits are precisely measurable: in followers, and in the promotion and sale of consumer goods.
For make no mistake, and this is the second big difference, the chief importance of the influencer is his or her effectiveness in moving goods. That’s what they do. (When opinion leaders do it, it’s a grave ethical lapse.) Influencers generally do not produce the goods or run the businesses that distribute those goods, but they provide outsourcing for the promotion and marketing of products, and in time develop a brand identity around the products they flog, and if they’re very successful, are sought out in turn by the producers of those goods. The brand identity provides the audience a kind of Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval, for whatever standard of good housekeeping one might have in mind.
Successful influencers need to have a lot of self-confidence, stepping out there as they do. They have to believe that their seal of approval matters. Back in May, The New Yorker ran an interview with a young woman who uses the moniker Tinx. An influencer with more than two million social media followers, she has become, the magazine says, “the arbiter of all that is worthy: boyfriend behavior, bachelorette destinations, where to order shrimp cocktails and Martinis in many a metropolis.”
Tinx has a podcast, a radio show, and a line of merchandise, including clothing and salad dressing. And she has now written a book, The Shift, which is billed as a guide “to becoming the main character of your life.” What are her qualifications for all this? “The goal is to know yourself, completely. And by that metric, I’m wise as fuck.”
All of this would be harmless, a great example of good old American brassiness, except for the nagging sense that there is nothing but the consensus of the crowd holding it all up, no criterion external to the opinions and tastes of the hyperconfident influencer and those who follow her advice. That’s OK if we are talking about condiments and cocktails, but what about issues of great public moment, issues of war and peace, the quality of our leaders, and the health of our families and our common life? What if there is no general standard to recur to? What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse, so that all issues, not merely the marketplace choices of consumers, are being addressed by people who are influencers, rather than authorities?
And it’s worth remembering who the biggest influencers are. We’re not talking about the next generation of Walter Lippmanns or George Wills. We’re talking about Kylie Jenner, Ariana Grande, Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson, Kim Kardashian, Demi Lovato, Justin Bieber, and Katy Perry (just a few representative names taken from a list of the top 35 influencers on Instagram in 2023). In other words, these are celebrities, valued more for style than substance, famous for being well-known, and glamorous beyond the reach (but not the dreams) of ordinary mortals. They have an ability to draw others into the force-field of their manufactured charisma, and induce the faux-intimacy that weds followers to what amounts to a cult of personality, complete with knowing winks and in-crowd signaling.
by Wilfred M. McClay, Hedgehog Review | Read more:
Image: Shutterstock
[ed. Pretty sure this misses the point. Influencers exist because they've learned how to navigate all the pitfalls and barriers of media, branding, income, and celebrity - no small achievement in itself - something their followers would probably all like to emulate. But there are downsides too - constantly being on a treadmill to produce endless content would be one of them.]
