All influencers now – Newspaper

WHEN you go out for a meal to a fancy restaurant, this is how matters proceed. As soon as you are seated, everyone grabs their phones and takes videos of the decor and ambience. This includes shots of the menu, the table arrangements and the general environment. Then, as soon as the food arrives, it must be photographed before it is eaten. Sizzling or smoking plates, blowtorches flaming crusts — all the dramatic touches are duly recorded. After the meal, there is another photo shoot, lipsticks are refreshed and cheeks sucked in. If there are five people, there will be as many takes of the photos, sometimes in multiple locations inside and outside the eatery.

As someone who is tired of this part of maintaining social relationships, I find this sort of thing tiresome and inauthentic. I am in a minority, however, because broadcasting where one eats, who one eats with, what one eats and what one wears when one eats has become the mainstay of social experience. If it is not promptly Instagrammed, we are forced to admit it didn’t happen, wasn’t enjoyed or had no value.

Value, in fact, is central to all of this. In the social media multiverse, our much-curated images and the record of our lives are equal to the value of our company. In other words, company is now a commodity and must be advertised and branded as one. Those who are not willing to participate in this marketplace of individual branding are increasingly outliers. If you feel strongly about your non-participation, you must let people know in advance and stand tolerantly to the side as others showcase their brand.

Influencers are to blame for this state of affairs. We all know that professional content creators engage in all this to burnish their credentials and boost reach; they imagine themselves the celebrities they almost are. Their habits, all of them designed to make us believe that they are ‘just like us’, are fed to an unthinking, scrolling public via 30-second reels or 20-minute vlogs. Influencers, we believe, are more or less benign, and the entertainment they provide is neutral in nature.

Influencer content is hardly real.

But the part that consumers miss is how the behaviour and strategies deployed by influencers are transforming the way in which we see ourselves and others. The people at the restaurant referred to earlier are not influencers. They may have a few hundred followers at most. Yet they feel pressured to use the strategies and vocabulary of influencers to present themselves as a valuable commodity. This is not to say that, prior to the advent of social media, people were not assessed based on their social capital. Indeed, they joined exclusive clubs to project just that. The difference is that in the current age of influencer domination, we have become obsessed with actions that will look good on social media.

Similar things can be said about the strategies that social media influencers use to appear ‘authentic’ or ‘relatable’. These strategies increase their viewership and earn them endorsements. They are devised by ‘algorithmic experts’, who evaluate which platforms push which content. Hence, influencers who go viral do not do so ‘accidentally’ because some of their content resonated with a large population. They go viral because they have crafted their content in a way that boosts its circulation and appears authentic to the public.

An example of this is deliberate mispronunciation. Influencers know if they mispronounce a word, many people will res­pond to their instinct to correct the in­­­f­luencer. This, in turn, will annoy others who will call out the correctors for ‘judging’. Engagement will go up and incr­e­­­­ase ‘views’ and ‘li-kes’. Another example is rage-bait. This occurs when an in­­fluencer deliberat­e­­ly does something unsightly, like wearing an ugly outfit. Once again, viewers will respond to the instinct to correct or berate, in the process earning dollars for the influencer who baited them.

Then there’s the ‘apology video’ — for instance, when an influencer does something stupid or is rude to a spouse or criticises a child. The fake controversy garners attention and criticism, only to be followed by the apology video in which fake tears are shed to pretend that influencers are just as fallible as their viewers. In the meantime, many wannabe influencers start putting up their own videos in which they end up sharing all sorts of intimate information that should never be online.

Influencer content, like so many other media, is hardly real. It is only when those who consume influencer content become aware of this truth that people will stop pretending that an untapped audience exists for their restaurant visits. Until then, wait 10 minutes before biting into that burger so it can be captured from every angle.

The writer is an attorney teaching constitutional law and political philosophy.

rafia.zakaria@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, August 9th, 2025

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