Influencers present divergent glamorized and grim self-images across platforms

Evidence

Alyssa Vanilla, whose YouTube channel has nearly fifteen thousand subscribers, tells of similar things—how to stay warm in the winter in a car, how to stay cool in the summer in a car, how to cook food in a car, how to pee in a car, how to date in a car—along with videos that tell of her sadness, loneliness, and anxiety. “I don’t know what my plans are for the future,” Vanilla says in one video; “it’d be really nice … so if you guys can make me famous in some way …” Vanilla’s #carlife looks radically different on her Instagram page than it does on YouTube. One is filled with well-lit, glamorous pictures of nature, of camping, of travel; the other is filled with videos where Vanilla talks about her feelings, the lack of a future in America, her car (meaning her home) getting totaled, her emotional and psychological struggles. Crump’s Instagram and YouTube pages display a similar difference—a set of Instagram images intended to represent freedom and liberty as one lives cheaply and independently across America, a set of YouTube videos talking of hardship and precarity. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 204

Categorization

• XREF: The Instagram/YouTube split maps onto the influencer-as-firm idea: different ‘departments’ of the self-company market to different audiences, echoing the four-infrastructure framework. — connects to: Narcissistic women use audiences rather than mirrors to confirm their self-image — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1813; Micro-celebrity authenticity rests on cross-platform consistency of self-presentation — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 284; Influencer-era self-help literature frames women as male-optimization trophies — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 456 (+3 more)