Micro-celebrity requires deliberately commodifying the self into a marketable persona

Evidence

Becoming a micro-celebrity requires a degree of self-commodification to create a “publicizable personality”; as Ernest Sternberg writes, “performers now intentionally compose their persona for the market, and do so through methods learned from the celebrity world.” The micro-celebrity self, like that of celebrities more generally, is carefully constructed and performed to attract attention and publicity. Laura Fitton, a social media marketer who rose to fame as her persona, Pistachio, describes writing her Twitter account as “kind of like being a newspaper columnist”: “I get that that’s not a hundred percent me … But I do think of Pistachio as kind of a separate entity. It doesn’t have followers. It has readers. It’s a thing.” Fitton distinguishes herself from her online persona, which she admits is filtered to show her in a positive way. She thinks of Pistachio as a “thing” that has an audience. Virtually everyone I interviewed was strategic about using social media to reveal or conceal certain aspects of themselves. Owen Thomas, a former Valleywag editor, explained, “With social media, we have a sense of the tools to craft those identities. It’s almost like when previous programmers had to write in assembly language. And now we got Visual Basic for constructing identities.” Profile pictures, likes and dislikes, and subjects chosen to tweet or blog about are calculated to give off a certain impression. — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 278

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines self-commodification as the core prerequisite of micro-celebrity, with the concrete case of Pistachio as a deliberately separate ‘thing’.
• XREF: Connects to Goffman’s dramaturgical self-presentation and Erving Goffman’s ‘presentation of self’ — foundational for the field. — connects to: Micro-celebrity is a learned status practice rooted in Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurial values — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 314; Micro-celebrity success brings psychic damage that can outweigh its rewards — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 319; Micro-celebrity status can be imposed by media regardless of self-presentation — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 345 (+12 more)
• SEED: Angle: the assembly-language vs Visual Basic metaphor for identity construction as a way to frame how modern identity-crafting tools lowered the barrier for everyone, not just celebs.

Broader Connections

• Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention #corroborates (0.85) — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031
• Early micro-celebrities deliberately modeled their personas on admired industry figures. #corroborates (0.78) — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, 309