Name of the Game — Real Life

In March, the UK Parliament announced the launch of a public inquiry into “influencer culture,” calling for experts who could inform confused MPs and civil servants what it is, exactly, that influencers do. As a media studies academic who has studied influencers in the UK for the past five years, I met with other academics in law, business, and computer science to help assemble a response. The first question presented to us was “How would you define influencers?” Each discipline’s answer reflected a different approach: Law scholars started with baseline contractual questions; business academics wanted to refer to the quality and effectiveness of their influence; computer scientists looked to influencers’ relationships with algorithms.

These are all worthwhile lines of inquiry, but for me, it’s pointless to identify influencer as a fixed occupational category. The use of this term and other related terms like content creator, is worth examining because these terms do certain things that are inseparable from the context of their use: They evoke certain feelings and associations, and they convey political motivations. Rather than give influencer or creator a static definition, we should look at who uses it and consider what they are trying to do. My approach here is informed by Sara Ahmed’s call in The Promise of Happiness to “follow language around,” seeing what terminology “can and does do.” Why do certain terms appeal? Why do they “stick to certain bodies” and not to others?

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