Celebrity talk-show car segments invert influencer form to manufacture authenticity

Evidence

Some of the most notable examples of car videos do not emerge organically from social media. (Although what, if anything, can be said to organically emerge from social media?) These videos are sometimes billed as talk shows, or segments on talk shows, and the most notable ones feature extremely popular and recognizable celebrities. In them, or more accurately, in the controversies they create, we can see how the car is a space between public and private, a space in which the self is imagined as authentic, not just a product crafted in the service of spectacular consumption. … Obviously, these videos attempt to mimic the form and style of social media influencers, a mimicking perpetuated by the culture industry to provide some modicum of authenticity to what is otherwise an obvious product. The subjects of these videos, ideally, appear not as traditional celebrities but as everyday people, reinvented through their placement in an intimate venue in which an audience can approach celebrity with a closeness usually prohibited. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 175

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the car-infrastructure thread from earlier chapters; juxtaposes with the reader’s four-infrastructure analysis of real creators.
• SEED: Possible essay angle: authenticity as an industrial product — mainstream media reverse-engineers influencer vernacular, proving the self-as-firm is now a mass-marketable template.