Are you an influencer? | The Press

A few days ago, Doctor Alain Vadeboncœur asked a question on Twitter. “I would be curious to see how people who refuse vaccines have come to decide that. On what basis? From what sources? »

In a way, he wondered what were the influences of people who choose to refuse the vaccine. Like more than 50,000 other Internet users, I follow Alain Vadeboncœur on Twitter, he is in a way one of my influencers in this endless pandemic.

The term “influencer” has been getting a lot of bad press lately, courtesy of a wild and irresponsible trip of young people to Cancún, organized by an entrepreneur who seems to have a mythomaniac bent. Like many people, this saga entertained me in the midst of depressing news, I subscribed to OD Scoop on Instagram and I would not have imagined that it would reach Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and his famous word ” ostrogoth” to describe these revelers.

In truth, the phenomenon of influencers has been frowned upon for quite a long time, in part because it has never stopped gaining momentum.

We often announce the end of this phenomenon, but I don’t believe it at all, because it is available in an impressive multitude of fields of interest on various platforms (Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, TikTok, etc.). Anyone can have their own channel and their own audience today. My boyfriend diligently follows the debunkers paranormal stuff on YouTube who are able to thoroughly analyze videos of ghosts and UFOs, and I’m sure there must be some big influencers in the knitting world. My thing is animal rescue videos.

If there’s one person who made me see influencers in a different light, it’s Daphne B., poet and author of the fascinating essay Made up, in which she dissects the world of make-up, the gurus of make-up and tutorial stars.

I discovered that you could get lost for hours in videos created by people who have the same interests as you, especially if they are good communicators.

Daphne B. is not sure that there can be a fixed definition of the term influencer, who is generally seen as someone who relies on his visibility and his personality (and his body at times) to make partnerships with brands, because it’s not just that on social networks. For example, during confinement, she watched a lot of videos of women talking about their fight against cancer. She loves antique toys and follows collectors who have their chains. Finally, she suggests to me Breadtube, which brings together a lot of often defrocked university philosophers who make videos on various subjects, like Contrapoint, a trans philosopher who can explain to you for 1h 30min what the experience of cringe emotion (and it’s really interesting). There are some pretty damn good influencers too.

Daphne B. leads me to this article by Sophie Bishop, from Real Life Magazine, in which the hypocrisy with which we decide between “influencers” and “content producers” is underlined.

Who decides on these names, exactly?

The contempt associated with influencers is, according to Daphne B., due to the fact that they are people “who don’t have a real job” and this is a bit of prejudice. It’s a job to stage, to shoot videos, to edit, to speak to people naturally – it’s moreover an autonomous and precarious job, which can happen overnight with a scandal or, on the contrary, take flight with a scandal. But in this area, there are of course inequalities; some people have more means than others to go to dream places all over the planet to fund their accounts, others also correspond to the formatted standards of beauty as we can see them in reality shows that are in fact breeding grounds for future influencers, whose popularity will be boosted by a general TV show. Or by a prime minister who will use “ostrogoth” in a press conference.

Moreover, Daphne B. wonders if Justin Trudeau was not advised by specialists to use this unexpected word. “It’s the recipe for creating viral content,” she tells me. You juxtapose two terms, ‘undesigned’, which everyone understands, and a quirk like ‘ostrogoth’, and it’s going to become a cultural meme that people are going to pick up on. As if he was boarding the boat and fueling the controversy, because it creates even more content. In any case, it was gold bars to divert attention from the management of the crisis, and it even became an advertisement for the Clan Panneton.

What personally fascinates me with influencers is that it’s a parallel world for a lot of people according to their interests, especially for those who rarely visit social networks or who follow, on these same networks, personalities who actually belong to the “mainstream” media. Moreover, it is often when the latter take over a case from this parallel world that a general excitement occurs and that we are ready to take out the guillotine for people we do not even know – except maybe teenagers, because we shouldn’t forget the generation gap in that. This is why my colleague Hugo Dumas had the very good idea of ​​giving credit to the creator of OD Scoop and talking to him – who found the scoop, precisely.

Anyway, the party aboard Sunwing’s flight offered formidable scapegoats at a critical time, Daphne B. believes, when looking at the violence of the backlash. “There is a cathartic spirit in this violence. When you feel stress, disappointment and anger, you need an outlet somewhere, and it was available to us. Our anger was directed at concrete people, with faces, supporting videos. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been something else. »

But these Sunwing flight revelers are just a drop in the ocean of “influencers” or “content producers”, they are not the only representatives of the phenomenon.

Anyone with a few thousand subscribers can be an influencer, when you think about it, and you shouldn’t put everyone in the same basket (a heavy trend of our time it seems, we just have to see it with the word “woke”).

Once again, we deplore an “era of emptiness” because of a few mindless people, but I would tend to believe in an era of “overflow” because they are legion producing content online, each second, as I write these lines. The angry gentleman who films himself in his car to criticize the sanitary measures with his subscribers like the grandmother who explains to us how to make a good apple pie.

We may all have become influencers, who knows. Because we are looked at when we produce “content”.