Global influencers’ content creation strategies: Negotiating with platform affordances to practice vernacular creativity

Abstract

We examine how globally oriented-influencers from India utilize specific strategies of content creation to negotiate with the dominant logic of platform affordances to engage with global audiences. It involves individual negotiations by the influencers with the platform affordances in creating content that foregrounds their cultural realities and aspirations while remaining relevant to global audiences. We do so by deploying the critical technocultural discourse analysis (CTDA) framework to understand influencers’ strategic choices and discursive practices as they interact and negotiate with the platform affordances. Our analysis shows two processes that help the influencers communicate their content to the global audience and sustain their local connections and followership: (1) Templatization: a process through which influencers from the global South attune themselves to the technological possibilities of the platform and utilize its features to produce content with a set of replicable patterns, formats, and practices; and (2) Cultural brokering: a negotiation strategy which allows the influencers to foreground and express their quotidian lived realities and cultural experiences in an increasingly globalized digital environment.