4 Creators and Influencers: Symbolic Interactionism

When Milli Vanilli won the Grammy for Best New Artist in 1990, it seemed like a logical choice.^[1] Their music from Girl You Know It’s True was everywhere. At the Grammy awards, the first sense of trouble occurred when the music, including the vocals began skipping, demonstrating they were lip-syncing their performance. Later that same year, it came out that Milli Vanilli did not sing on the recording of their album and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences took the unprecedented step to revoke the Grammy from the duo^[2].

Fast forward 30 years and lip-syncing is not only standard practice, it is a route to musical success. Ashlee Simpson famously struggled when the wrong song played on Saturday Night Live in 2004^[3]. But it isn’t surprising when artists lip-sync to a recorded track, especially ones who dance while singing. However, lip-syncing as a route to get discovered is a new phenomenon.

The division of a record label that “discovers” new talent is called the A&R (Artist & Repertoire) division. In the past, A&R executives were known to keep their ear to the street. They would go to bars to find talent. They act as major gatekeepers who describe new music in terms of their feelings about the music. At times, their penchant for vibe seemed to rely more on their gut than anything else, but most A&R executives dealt in facts. They wanted to know: how many people attend a show? How big is their mailing list? How many records do they sell? Do people purchase and wear their merch (merchandise) around town? What is the buzz around an artist?

Social media and influencer culture changed everything. Bella Poarch was the first TikTok celebrity. Her lip-synching, head-bobbing, and weird faces made her an instant hit. For a while her lip-synch of “M to the B” stood as the most viewed and most liked TikTok video. As of writing, it is the fifth most viewed (825.5 million) and the most liked (64.1 million) video on TikTok. Poarch’s video overshadows the song by Millie B, who remains obscure. People watched the video for Poarch’s personality. The entertainment industry took notice and Warner Records signed her. Warner knew that her TikTok following could easily transfer to streams. As of writing, her song “Build a Bitch” garnered 511 million views on YouTube and 476 million streams on Spotify.

Now the flow of influencers turned music stars is a flood. From Bhad Bhabie to Jxdn and Addison Rae to Lil Nas X, many people get their start in the music industry by being an influencer or creator. But what is an influencer? Who do they influence? This chapter explores the root of influence from the sociological concept of symbolic interactionism.

Symbolic Interactionism

When people interact, they use signs to convey meaning. Symbolic interactionism is a sociological theory that looks at these interactions. An interaction is “the reciprocal influence of individuals upon one another’s actions when a given set of individuals are in one another’s continuous presence.”^[4] To take an interactionist approach to popular culture means to focus on how popular culture spreads among a group of people through interpersonal interactions among individuals.

This is microsociology—i.e., small groups of people interacting with each other. The smallest group of people is a dyad: a group of two people. Symbolic interactionism looks at what happens between small groups of individuals and how the dynamics of any given interaction works.

Sociologist Erving Goffman (1922-1982) took what he termed a “dramaturgical approach” to small group interactions in his book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959). A dramaturgical approach explores the way we perform roles in groups of people. When we meet someone we don’t know, we can only figure out who they are by what they tell us. “Information about the individual helps to define the situation, enabling others to know in advance what he will expect of them and what they may expect of him.”^[5] Our previous interactions with other people help us understand the person. As a result, those around us define who we are in a situation by our previous performances.

Since every interaction is a performance, Goffman shows that there is a division between our frontstage and backstage selves. Backstage is the true self, while frontstage is a performance. Take The Real World’s slogan “When people stop being polite and start getting real”^[6]– discussed in the Introduction. This is the clarion call of reality TV as the entire genre aims to show real everyday people being their backstage selves. But we know we can never get the “real” on television, it’s always a performance even if the performers are unscripted. We try to manage these interactions on our terms, but the dynamics of the group impede the interpretation of our social selves. Social media provides an excellent platform for us to manage the social self, but the artificiality of it is as visible as reality TV. See Box 1 for an analysis of Black Mirror’s “Nosedive” episode.

At the micro-sociological level, two related processes are at work. First, our peer groups influence our popular culture tastes. When we talk to other people, we discuss television shows, movies, celebrities, music, etc. Since we want to be able to hold a conversation, we begin to consume the same popular culture. Second, Culture Industry executives depend on micro-level interaction to spread their material. Executives want people to consume popular culture, so they hope people make connections worth discussing with each other. These interconnected processes drive cultural consumption through microlevel interactions.

Spreading Culture through Interactions

An interactionist approach to popular culture doesn’t only look at the way people interact, but it also analyzes the way popular culture spreads. Popular culture doesn’t exist in a vacuum and explicit advertising isn’t the only way we hear about new music, television, movies, video games, etc. As we interact with each other, we also spread word about the culture we enjoy or hate.

People spread the word about different objects and ideas through word-of-mouth. This type of interaction is emphasized by marketing professionals. When people watch, listen, or otherwise consume something, they tell other people about it, especially if they think it is great or horrible. If they see or hear something that is boring, they don’t say anything about it. Therefore, content producers want something remarkable that gets people discussing it. For instance, the abject reaction people had to watching Human Centipede made the movie a cult classic—usually sleeper films that do not perform well at the box office but establish a dedicated following later. The film flopped in the theaters, grossing $181,467 in the US and Canada and $325,113 worldwide.^[7] But as people watched it and told others, it grew a dedicated following, which allowed Tom Six to secure the funds to create two more films in the sequence. Human Centipede had buzz—a considerable amount of word-of-mouth. Note buzz here that all buzz is good buzz because it drives people to engage the popular culture content whether it is good or not.

There are three types of people in groups who spread the word about new commodities, cultural items, and ideas: opinion leaders, early adopters, and market mavens.^[8]Opinion leaders are people who make it their job to acquire knowledge about new products or cultural artifacts in a specific category. This is your friend who obsesses about new shoes and tells everyone about it. I had a computer engineer friend who I always talked to when I was ready to buy a new computer because he made it his job to understand the difference between personal computers.Early adopters are people who wait in line at stores to be the first to purchase something. They are easily identifiable as the first person to get a new product, and they let everyone know about their purchases. They can often be seen waiting in line for the release of new products. Market mavens are like opinion leaders, but instead of focusing on one category, they try to have broad expertise of consumer culture. Another friend of mine fits this category regarding popular culture; he can recite his encyclopedic knowledge about anything from the latest punk release to the most interesting vloggers.

The most important factor to spread culture is a person’s social networks. Here I do not mean social network in the sense of social media, but social network in a broader sense. A social network includes the friends, family members, acquaintances, colleagues connected to a person. These connections can be strong or weak. To be well-connected, a person can have a very broad network of weak ties.

Social networks inform our taste in popular culture. We start to embody the tastes and likes of those around us, so if we want to learn about different popular culture, we must look to our broader networks for new tastes. Some people transcend popular cultural tastes among a broad social network. These people are cultural emissaries—people who introduce popular culture from group to another. A great example of a cultural emissary is Ferris Bueller from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. Bueller seamlessly moves from one group of people to another introducing his friends to new cultural experiences.

Subcultures

We’re all part of social networks that provide us with a sense of taste primarily through subcultures. A subculture is a group of people who recognize they are part of a group and define themselves against the dominant or mainstream culture. Within these subcultures, people construct a sense of style and identity. Popular culture usually forms among subcultures before being appropriated by the dominant culture.

Subcultural analysis developed out of cultural studies, in the Birmingham School tradition (discussed in the introduction)^[9]. Cultural studies emphasizes the ways that subcultures use “commodities as signifiers in an active process of constructing ‘oppositional’ identities.”^[10] Following World War II, youth culture became a concept. This was partly due to a desire to market goods to teenagers. Of course, “youth” always existed, but the idea of youth culture also emerged as greater economic and social stability grew for people under the age of 18. As more people stayed in school instead of going into the workforce, distinct cultures developed.

These studies of subculture show the “polysemic qualities of commodities,”^[11] which means every cultural object has multiple meanings. As such, meaning construction is a very active process in which people in subcultures take part. Subculture theorists argue that consumption of commodities by subcultures is resistant to the dominant culture.

Dick Hebdige provided the earliest account of polysemic qualities in use by people in subcultures in his book Subculture: the meaning of style.^[12] Hebdige followed the cultural development of the punk subculture with roots in several previous subcultures. Punk emerged out of working-class youth culture as marginalized teens attempted to make meaning out of the world around them. They used what was around them to create a resistant aesthetic: car grease to make their hair spike, piercings with safety pins, chains to connect their wallets to their pants, and well-worn clothing with holes. Over time, the dominant culture co-opts the aesthetics of the subculture. Co-optation or appropriation is the retaking of culture from subculture by the dominant culture, which emerges purely as style. With the co-optation of punk style, people can get nose piercings at Claire’s Boutique, buy styling gel at a salon, and purchase pre-ripped and frayed jeans. Through co-optation, the aesthetics that started as resistant become style.

Popular culture is situated in scenes – “the actual places where subcultural participants experience their shared identity through social interaction.”^[13] Scenes exist in three places: local, translocal, and virtual. Local scenes are specific places that gain their own culture. Every city has a local music scene that becomes linked to its subculture. For instance, hip-hop is associated with The Bronx in New York City. Translocal scenes “circulate fashions and lifestyles in patterns of cross-national diffusion.”^[14] Here it is helpful to think about the ways popular culture circulates across the globe. While hip-hop originated in The Bronx, it is now a global phenomenon. For instance, K-Pop artists use hip-hop beats, dance moves, and clothing styles, but then hip-hop artists are influenced by K-pop. Virtual scenes exist when people in translocal scenes discuss popular culture online. Fan fiction websites produce virtual scenes as they are global phenomena where people around the world can engage and create their own storylines online.

Subcultures create and spread popular culture. With the advent of social media, subcultures now tend to exist predominantly in virtual scenes.

Influencers

An influencer is someone who holds a position of power among a group of people through interactions. Influence happens as a result of relational dynamics between people. Someone who holds influence can get other people to act. Figures like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Mahatma Ghandi inspired people to act because of their magnetism in pursuit of social justice. People want to follow other people who they think command attention.

Celebrities in mass media have always been able to influence others. Because of their ubiquity, people see what celebrities wear, hear what they say, and perceive how they act. This causes other people to wear the same clothing, say the same words, and overall act like celebrities.

With the development of social media, influencer became a term for people with large online followings. But what do they influence? Do they cause people to pursue social justice like King and Ghandi? Unfortunately, we think of social media influencers as marketers because of their “influence.” There is more literature on influencers in marketing than sociology, and this becomes evident in the role of influencers in culture. In the social media era, an influencer is someone who holds sway over an audience’s decisions. An influencer’s job is to put products in front of people.

As the term influencer became synonymous with marketer, the marketing divisions of corporations began to call them creators. Creator implies that the value of the person lies not in their ability to market goods, but rather in their ability to create content. According to sociologist Michael Siciliano, content is a “roughly interchangeable commodity rather than a singular cultural object.” The content could be someone eating food, or it could be an animated movie. Meanwhile, creator connects with broader workers in the culture industry from actors to software programmers, who we otherwise call creative workers. But for whom do they create content? The answer is creators create content for large corporations. In other words, content is something creators create for other companies to make money. Content is interchangeable because platforms in their intermediaries do not care about the content of the “content.”

For some people with a reputation for spreading information via word-of-mouth, influencer culture has been a boon. Whether they are market mavens, early adopters, or opinion leaders, influencers translate their obsession with popular culture or products into their own form of celebrity. YouTube and social media created a place for these people to show off their knowledge about commodities and culture with people outside of their friend circles. People will watch YouTubers geek-out about the most mundane new products, even if they have no intention to buy anything.

Influencer culture is more seductive than reality TV because we think we are watching the true backstage personality of these people, but really it is just another performance.

Celebrities and selling out

In the past, celebrities avoided advertising and when they did engage in advertising, it was considered an endorsement. There are pitfalls with aligning oneself too closely with a company, product, or brand. Celebrities wanted to keep their own brand separate from that of a corporation.

For example, Michael Jordan built a very close relationship with Nike. In 1997, Air Jordan became its own brand, and by 2022, the Jordan Brand brought in over $5 billion for Nike.^[15] But the marriage between Michael Jordan and Nike was never smooth. There have been numerous controversies over violence caused by kids’ desires to have Jordan’s sneakers resulting in assault and murder. At other times, questions arose from Nike’s use of sweatshops through contractors. In both cases, Michael Jordan did not have a response to the lives of kids harmed by his sneakers.^[16]

For rock and hip-hop artists, there was no greater diss in the 1990s than to be called a “sell-out.”^[17] Musicians did not want their music to be played in commercials because it was terribly uncool. But there was also good reason for their resistance because associating with a company found to use sweatshops is deplorable. It also led to the development of advertising jingles as a way for musicians to make money.^[18]

Fast forward to the 2020s and celebrities are everywhere in advertising. Selling out is no longer a rational concept as celebrities approach advertising as part of their income streams.^[19] From Matthew McConaughey starring in car commercials to Bob Dylan using “The Times They Are A-Changin” in a Brother Printers commercial. Now famous artists with huge song catalogs, like Dylan, have sold their catalogs to private equity firms who can use the music in ads without restrictions.^[20]

Influence has become a commodity celebrities can trade for cash.

Influencers are Sell-Outs

There is a certain irony with influencers. On the one hand, they sell themselves as true authentic people. Their following depends on keepin’ it real. On the other hand, influencers give presentations of self that are designed to make followers feel they are real, while providing an entirely fake persona.

Everything influencers do is to build their brand and market products. Whether that is a video unboxing sneakers or someone wearing a branded t-shirt while talking about their partner in a vlog. The most unusual influencer ad I saw was an academic on Twitter discussing how much they loved a new Post-It product.

Addison Rae is a perfect example of a lip-syncing influencer turned brand extraordinaire. She started by lip-syncing and dancing to popular songs on TikTok. Then she turned herself into a brand with a podcast and dated another influencer. Her life became a drama for people to consume. Then she signed a record contract with Warner Music Entertainment and a movie deal with Netflix. Now she is everywhere in pop superstardom.

Her hit song “Diet Pepsi” is instructive of the power of influencers. “Diet Pepsi” is a single only an influencer could write. It is both about Diet Pepsi and not about Diet Pepsi at all. Branded without being about the brand. An empty signifier ready to associate whatever you want with Diet Pepsi. All sung using ASMR to stimulate parts of the listener’s brain. In fact, she uses the phrase Diet Pepsi to represent a vibe, but only a vibe Addison Rae can define.^[21] Netflix and Warner Music knew they could turn Rae’s following into cash.

It turns out that having a large following can allow you to become an influencing vessel for brands.

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