Social media reframed self-identity as a personal brand selling attention

Evidence

Of course, by the numbers, even the achievement of microfame was a rarity. But perhaps the odds were beside the point. As Mark Zuckerberg said of Facebook users, “They’re also building an image and identity for themselves, which in a sense is their brand.” Indeed, with Facebook and Twitter, everyone could now have a brand, and derive a little of the excitement and attention that went with traditional celebrity—perhaps even find a way to resell a bit of that attention. It portended a future a bit different than Andy Warhol had predicted, for in this future “everyone will be famous to fifteen people,” as the technologist David Weinberger quipped. Nonetheless, as Rex Sorgatz argued, “It feels like a step toward equality. You can become Facebook friends with the microfamous; you can start IM sessions with them. You can love them and hate them at much closer proximity.” And so just as American democracy promised that any child could grow up to become president, and American capitalism promised that through hard work anyone could become rich, the attention economy threw up its own mirage for the discontented masses: fame for everyone. — Tim Wu, The Attention Merchants, 1031

Categorization

• CANDY: “Everyone will be famous to fifteen people” is a punchy, tweetable restatement of Warhol’s prophecy.
• XREF: Connects to the democratization-of-fame mirage later echoed in micro-influencer literature and the creator economy discourse. — connects to: Entrepreneurship became a generalized ideal pervading personal identity and relationships; Online self-presentation expresses a neoliberal subjectivity applying market principles to identity — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 25; Social media metrics convert audience size into a comparable measure of personal status — Alice E. Marwick, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity,…, 245 (+30 more)
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: whether microfame actually delivered on the equality Sorgatz describes or reproduced celebrity hierarchies in new form.

Broader Connections

• Instagram converted self-expression into an influencer advertising engine #exemplifies (0.90)
• Social media promotes an ideal of privatizing the self into corporate form #expands (0.88) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 354
• Personal branding reduces identity to a predictable pattern of consumer preferences #expands (0.85) — Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing, 472
• Showing oneself as a self online begins the manufacturing of the self as commodity #corroborates (0.85) — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 61
• Personal branding online creates performative doppelgangers demanding constant attention #expands (0.82) — Naomi Klein, Doppelganger, 32