Sharing a recent episode of the Overthink philosophy podcast on Influencers -- which ties into our discussions last week and this week about the relationship between algorithms, platforms, and users. The hosts talk about the case of Lil Miquela, an Instagram influencer who "came out" as virtual, discussing the company that runs the account and the ways it draws on popular (read: both of the people and trending) social movements and evolving gender tropes. They explore to what extent Miquela influences vs. is influenced by algorithms, bringing to mind Gillespie's discussion of calculated publics and entanglement with practice, as well as van Dijck's distinction between users and usage.
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ReplyDeleteBlog post 4/10 (Hyejoo)
ReplyDeleteOmg. Virtual influencers both fascinate and disturb me. I wonder if you've heard of a very closely related group of "virtual streamers" (e.g. "CodeMiko" on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/c/CodeMiko), real people who stream while wearing 3D bodysuits rendered into CGI in real time. I guess it's a very literal extension of a "persona" while still retaining the real human's voice and "character"––I guess they're not as essentially influenced by algorithms, though, at least not in the way Miquela is inherently malleable and constructed to pertain to algorithms––but instead play on a different allure of virtuality? Or, by using the bodysuits and rendering their real bodies into 3D images, virtual streamers codify the human body. In that case, there is not much difference between virtual streamers and CGI influencers as at the end of the day, their online presence is code (apart from, maybe, the voice, though I can imagine someone could debate that voice, speech, language are all "code" as well).
Yeah, virtual influencers. What gets me about Lil Miquela is that she is racially ambiguous or "mixed-race"? Why is it that virtual influencers look like 'exotic' 'mixed-race' girls and what kind of implications does it have in both fetishizing and commodifying racial ambiguity. It somewhat irks me. During undergrad, I experienced Title IX by a professor who thought I was basically some inhuman piece of 3d rendered pixel surface as if I was Lil Miquela. There's also a few other virtual models, especially in Japan, and it also is curious that Asianness gets once again conflated as a piece of technology. (Marisol, BLOG POST 5/15).
ReplyDeleteMarisol Vasquez Non-Core Post 2/10
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