YouTube’s authenticity is a staged ruse built on domestic intimacy

Evidence

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. The influencers we watch speak to us through direct address, talking to us one-on-one as individuals, as if we are not members of an often exceptionally large, anonymous mass. In consuming these videos, we believe we know about quotidian aspects of lives that may otherwise be obscure or invisible. — Grant Bollmer, Katherine Guinness, The Influencer Factory, 121

Categorization

• DEFINE: Establishes the authenticity-pleasure that influencer form exploits, key to defining how the Corpocene uses domestic space.
• XREF: Connects to how corporate personhood claims transparency/access while remaining sealed — the influencer mirror of the corporate veil. — connects to: YouTube search algorithms force beauty vloggers to change how they speak. — Crystal Abidin and Megan Lindsay Brown (eds.), Microcelebrity Around the Globe:…, 1199; Homecamming differs from reality TV in being unedited and uncontrived — Theresa M. Senft, Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in…, 141