The influencer’s home is a staged factory space presented as authentic privacy

Evidence

Where do you live? On YouTube, the ruse of many influencers, maybe even most of them, is that we’re seeing into the backgrounds of private lives. We’re watching a document recorded in intimate space. We’re seeing “everyday” people in their daily routines, as their lives are lived, au natural. Yet the idea of “natural” or unmediated living on the screen is quickly becoming a relic of the past. This contradiction is perplexing. We know that most social media images are false, constructed, or at least partial, yet we believe that we are seeing, at times, these influencers in their actual homes. That much is authentic, we may think: the space of the home, where we glance influencers preparing their coffee in the particularly aesthetic way they like or delicately unpacking package after package from Shein or Wish. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the home as one of the four infrastructures of the influencer’s production process, though staged as authentic private life.
• SEED: The gap between audience belief in authentic domestic access and the staged reality of production could anchor an essay on how ‘authenticity’ itself is manufactured.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s house-as-infrastructure framework and the general spectacle/commodity analysis of influencer culture.