It’s not just celebrities and YouTubers who are paid to plug stuff – now everyday Instagram citizens are being courted
For his book Mimesis, the German-Jewish literary critic Erich Auerbach undertook a grand survey of western literature from his wartime exile in Istanbul. He wanted to show that literature was becoming ever more democratic in its representation of reality, ever more attentive to the human individual. From Homer’s gods and monsters, we had moved through Shakespeare’s warriors and kings, to Austen’s ladies, Dickens’s merchants and Zola’s workers, down into Woolfian streams of consciousness. Here, at least, was a sort of moral progress to set against the darkness of the Third Reich.
Clearly there’s a similar dynamic at play in Instagram influencing – that signature 21st-century means of “representing reality” (to use an Auerbachian term). A few years ago, only celebrity demigods such as Rihanna were courted by brands for their coconut water endorsements on the photo-sharing platform. Soon it was the turn of more #relatable individuals such as the makeup vlogger Zoella and her YouTuber boyfriend Alfie Deyes, who built up multimillion-follower counts and now incessantly try to sell them things. “Big love to @visit.dubai for helping make the holiday happen!” Deyes captioned a recent selfie in the lift of a luxury hotel – part of a “paid partnership” with the afore-hashtagged.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2PofGzA
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