Homemade pet celebrities: the everyday experience of micro-celebrity in promoting the self and others

Abstract

ABSTRACT Pet influencers are rising stars on social media, and many everyday social media users also curate profiles for their pets for fun. This study established a cat Instagram account and uses ethnographic methods to investigate the phenomenon of pet Instagram as a kind of affective community co-habited by humans and nonhuman others. Recent studies of micro-celebrity have emphasised the practice of micro-celebrity – engaging in self-promotion and addressing followers as fans – as a calculating self-presentation strategy used by many successful influencers to update their status. In fact, as this study shows, many everyday social media users also perform as a celebrity to promote themselves and others, like rescue cats, without striving for money and their own status. This article reaffirms that the micro-celebrity is an ordinary, somewhat pleasurable experience for everyday social media users, whose selves constantly cross boundaries to build affinity with others, rather than merely presenting the extended self to serve one’s ego. Moreover, this case study of pet Instagram shows that the practice of micro-celebrity on social media as teamwork can affectively, productively, and playfully reaffirm how the self is always part of and constituted by multiple others, including nonhuman animal others.