Celebrity Bloggers and Vloggers

Abstract

Social media have opened up the way for two trends in celebrity culture: celebrities from “traditional” spheres have embraced social media to create direct relationships with audiences; and ordinary users have gained visibility using a microcelebrity technique to become increasingly acknowledged as social media influencers. Celebrities and influencers use blogs and vlogs, in combination with other social media, to narrate their everyday lives in order to create an authentic persona to their audiences, which is seen as part of self‐branding inherent to neoliberalist culture. While sharing what were previously private moments, such as breastfeeding or time with their children, may approximate celebrities and microcelebrities from ordinary audiences, and while some opportunities for non‐normative gender and sexual identities exist, the prevalent representation on social media consists of an articulation of empowerment and consumerism that is aggravated regarding women and girls. Elements of celebrity and microcelebrity cultures have even incorporated a “feminist chic” narrative, which can, at best, contest some of the inequality in these cultural fields, or merely represent a superficial and anodyne form of feminism. Moreover, social media have attracted female cultural producers without contesting the inequality of the wider post‐Fordist economy, while their functioning within an attention economy have continued and accentuated the emotional labor necessary to attract and maintain audiences familiar with celebrity culture.