Research Seminar: Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media

Angèle Christin is visiting the University of Leeds on Wednesday 21 October for a research seminar titled Gurus, Hucksters, Entertainers: How Influencers Reshaped Social Media. She's an associate professor of communication and a Senior HAI Fellow at Stanford University, and the talk comes from her ethnographic fieldwork with a wide range of influencers — vegan YouTubers, 'dads of Instagram', and self-described drama commentators. The aim is to demystify the content creator economy, its long history, and the pitfalls that come with its professionalisation.

Christin's main point is that creators tend to cluster into three types. There are the 'hucksters', who work on behalf of brands; the 'entertainers', who chase virality and platform payments; and the 'gurus', who monetise the loyalty of their fans. From there, she argues that platform labour structurally fosters precarity, inequality, and inflammatory content online, and that influencer careers and revenues shape the very content that populates our social media feeds. It's a look at the machinery behind the feeds we scroll every day, and how the way creators make their money changes what they actually post.

Christin has written three books, including the award-winning Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms, so this sits right in her wheelhouse of how algorithms and metrics shape the work people do online. The seminar runs from 15:45 to 17:00 in the Clothworkers North Building LT (G.12) at the University of Leeds, and it's free to attend.