Tag Archive for: digital first personality

The rise of digital first personalities during COVID-19 isolation

Nats What I Reckon

For many of us who have been impacted by the stay-at-home isolation conditions during this global pandemic, we have turned to new forms of social media entertainment for comfort.

However, for prime-time celebrities who rely heavily on their production teams to create world-class media experiences, the transition has not been so seamless. Instead, what we have seen is the rise of those online content producers who are native to social media platforms amass new audiences of interest.

I have been researching digital first personalities around the globe to understand how single person media productions have become the go-to media source for many individuals, especially in times of isolation.

Celebrities as YouTubers? ‘That’s Chat’

On 30 March 2020, YouTubers Colin and Samir published a video ‘Is this the end of Late Night?’. On the surface this video seemed to make light of the careers of late-night hosts such as Seth Meyers, Jimmy Fallon and Stephen Colbert. In reality, these LA based YouTube creators provide a stunning commentary on the vast difference of skill and expertise levels between native YouTubers and traditional prime time celebrities.

This difference becomes bleedingly obvious when a number of these traditional celebrities were forced to take their productions out of their ‘bright-light’ studios in New York and Los Angeles, and retreat to their private family homes.

While the hosts incorporated the inadequacies of their production design into their nightly comedy routine, for example Seth Meyers making jokes about his attic door which has become something of a regular ‘guest’, the deficiencies in production qualities began to show. Some channels went into hiatus for several days at time, interviews were plagued by poor quality internet connections, lighting was experimental and the technical issues often became obvious for the audiences of these loved programs.

This is not the case for YouTubers who continue to produce high-quality content.

Colin and Samir observe that YouTubers are equipped to not only create entertaining content, but also have the technical skills to write, shoot, edit, publish and distribute at a level far beyond our well-known traditional media celebrities.

‘Good Onya Champ’ – The rise of digital first personalities

I have written about this phenomenon as digital first personalities. Digital first personalities are individuals who produce digital content for maximum visibility by engaging social influencer publication strategies that appease platform algorithms. In other words, they are experts in ensuring their content is seen by large audiences across social media platforms by utilising their entertaining and technical production skills.

Nat’s What I Reckon is one example of online content producers that are rising in popularity on social media, based on their past abilities of interacting with their audiences. As a YouTuber and Instagrammer based in Sydney, he has recently amassed a large audience through his welcomed, no-frills isolation cooking segments. Nat has been posting videos on YouTube for several years, examining the Summer Nationals in Canberra, why cruise ships ‘are weird’, chilli eating competitions, and aliens in Roswell, USA. These videos had a steady audience of just under 10,000 views on average, but as the media hungry, COVID-19 isolated audience grew, Nat’s What I Reckon channel has grown into an almost overnight success story.

As a digital first personality, Nat has spent years not only developing his unique entertaining style, but has also sharpened his interview technique, camera skills, and audio production. Additionally, this digital first personality has honed his public relations skills by strengthening his audience across Instagram and distributing his work across several other social media platforms.

I also wanted to make special mention of Laura Clery, who even makes me laugh as I write her name here – a strong example of a digital first personality, although she does some fame from her previous YouTube life.

The End of the Late Show?

Probably not. But what we are witnessing here is a shift of audience attention away from the large-scale traditional media formats and a continued growth across social media platforms as isolated audiences change their viewing habits indefinitely.

This is a unique moment for online content producers who demonstrate key digital first personality skills. Using TikTok, the demand for content is much higher than what is produced, making this a space ideal for emerging digital first personalities to build their audiences and move from influencers towards native online content celebrities.

Original Image by Newcastle Live!

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Data Intermediation: Towards transparent public automated media

Jonathon_Hutchinson_Transparent_Infrastructures

I have just completed a world-wind European tour, giving lectures at some of the best media institutes this side of the planet. Thanks to all the folk who made this possible, and took the time to promote my work. I’d like to reflect on that work and the discussions I’ve had with many great people within this post as I prepare this thinking for my next book – namely who should be facilitating and innovating transparent automated media systems? I argue public Service Media (PSM).

The thrust of this latest research was to problematise the concept of the ‘black-box’ as has been argued by so many scholars as something that we have no control over and are almost helpless to its control.

I think some of the most important work in this space was undertaken by Frank Pasquale and his Black Box Society book, which highlights the role algorithms play in society from a finance, legal and economic’s perspective. His argument of how algorithms control not only finance, but our digital lives, is a call for increased transparency and accountability on those who facilitate these technologies.

I also appreciate the work of many scholars who contribute and develop this arena of scholarship. Safiya Noble has done amazing work here and here book Algorithms of Oppression is a landmark piece of scholarship that brings to bear the real world implications of how algorithms are not only bias, but racist and oppressive.

Noble’s book leads well into Tania Bucher’s also groundbreaking book If…Then, that further develops the politics of algorithms and automated systems, to offer media academics a framework to help think through some of the implications of these socio-technical constructs.

I also find Christian Sandvig’s work incredibly inspiring here. While Sandvig’s work on algorithms and discrimination is super interesting, this particular piece on Auditing Algorithms sparked a particular interest in me on how to research algorithms.

But what I have found through most of this literature are two things, and this is perhaps where my ‘application brain’ is most curious. Firstly, most scholars tend to ignore user agency in these relationships, as if we are helplessly at the mercy of mathematical equations that are determining our society. Most (some) people are aware of the algorithm, and how to work alongside it these days, if our interface with platforms like Netflix, Spotify, YouTube etc. is anything to go by. Secondly, no-one talks of who should be responsible for facilitating a better system. Should we simply make more policy that tries to calm the overlord digital tech companies of now, or should we be thinking five to ten years ahead on how that technology can be used for society’s benefit (and not in a Chineses Social Credit System sense, either)?

So that is what I have been talking about in the last few weeks, and I think it is really important to include in the automated media conversation. I have been developing a digital intermediation framework that incorporates a number of these actors, and trying to understand how the intermediation process occurs. Check this out:

Digital intermediation actors, as part of the intermediation process

This is a first parse at what will become an important tool for a facilitating organisation who should be leading and innovating in this space: public service media.

Work has already commenced in this space, and we can draw on the thoughts of Bodó et al. (2018):

Public service media have charters that oblige them to educate, inform, and sustain social cohesion, and an ongoing challenge for public service media is interpreting their mission in the light of the contemporary societal and technological context. The performance metrics by which these organizations measure the success of their algorithmic recommendations will reflect these particular goals, namely profitability, loyalty, trust, or social cohesion.

Bodó, B., Helberger, N., Eskens, S., & Möller, J. (2019). Interested in Diversity. Digital Journalism, 7(2), 206–229.

So then, how does PSM do this? One way is to embed it in editorial policies to ensure PSM employees are operating as such. Another is to undertake PSM innovation remit and start teaching its users on how to work with algorithms effectively.

I don’t think ‘cracking open the black-box’ is all that useful to operationalise. They are often complex algorithmic formulas that require specialist expertise to design and interpret. But affording a control mechanism that enables users to ‘tweak’ how the algorithm performs may be not only possible, but crucial.

This is my focus for my last few weeks while I am working as a Research Fellow here in Hamburg.

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Digital First Personality: An overview

Jonathon_Hutchinson_Digital_First-Personality

EDIT: It is worth noting that News UK has teamed up with The Fifth to undertake exactly the point of this article. Read the Digiday article here.

In around 2017, Mike Williams and I had a few beers (can I say that?) in one of the studios at the ABC with a view to thinking through what was happening in the media at that time.

Instagram was ‘blowing up’, YouTube was going nuts, and a swag of micro platforms such as Vine, Musical.,ly, and others were fuelling the rise of branded content producers – otherwise known as solo content producers, otherwise known as influencers.

Both Mike and I had, and still do, have our favourite content producers, as I’m sure many readers do, and we often refer to their channels to see what they are doing, how they are reacting to certain global events, of what the latest trends might be.

But what we were interested in that night was understanding how this exploding creative industry was running alongside the existing media organisations, or was it all – where we both had a keen interest in how the ABC was shaping up in comparison.

One of the concepts we started throwing around was this idea that social media content producers now make their celebrity-ness online, build these massive audiences (or highly engaged audiences), and then often make the jump to traditional media. At the time, #7dayslater had just finished season 1 and I thought it was going to be a new production model the ABC would indeed pursue (but then, funding cuts).

What #7dayslater did represent however, was the praxis between online content producers and media organisations such as the ABC. And so was born the first concept of the Digital First Personality.

Of course this concept only raised more questions that night, like:

  • Why would a content producer become popular with their own style, and then switch over to somewhere like the ABC (with a remit for public service)?
  • How could they maintain their platform salary if they were to go off brand with their audience (suddenly start talking about the ABC as part of their suite of everyday-ness)
  • Should online content producers be trained by media organisations, and if so does that mean traditional celebrities should ‘learn’ social media?
  • Does the digital first personality become the new cultural intermediary?
  • Now that we have finished several beers, shall we go and have dumplings?

I’ve been thinking, researching and developing these questions for the last few years (beyond the call for dumplings), and have developed the concept of the digital first personality significantly. I first took it for a test drive with my MECO3602 Online Media students who bought into it and then also pulled the idea apart. I have presented the idea at a few conferences and have received some great feedback from colleagues along the way. Recently, I have resubmitted an article with major revisions to an A ranked journal, and am hopeful it will be published soon.

The last round of revisions with that journal really pushed me to think through some of the fundamental and theoretical concepts of the digital first personality. More broadly, I am beginning to draw connections between the digital first personality and microplatformization as part of the Digital Intermediation research project – how online content producers craft their skills as cultural intermediaries that are both experts at social influence and understanding platform automation, i.e. recommender systems. This is now starting to feed into the infrastructure work I am undertaking within the automated media space.

Here’s a basic introduction to how I am approaching the framework of the digital first personality:

Intermediation has traditionally been undertaken by a number of stakeholders including institutions, humans and non-human actors, to transfer information from one group of individuals to another. Recently, two new actors have emerged within the digital media ecology through cultural intermediation: social media influencers and automated media systems engaging algorithms. Cultural intermediation as a framework is a useful way to understand emerging social and cultural forms as a result of new media technologies. Cultural intermediation (Bourdieu, 1984) that describes how social capital can be exchanged between different stakeholder groups also incorporates market economics (Smith Maguire and Matthews, 2014) and expertise exchange. The latest iteration of cultural intermediation includes the agency of platforms, social media influencers and increasingly algorithms. Understanding this new form of cultural intermediation is crucial to enable items of public importance to remain visible.

Social influencers, which have previously been referred to as microcelebrities (Marwick, 2013; Senft 2013) and digital influencers (Abidin, 2016), are a particular subset of cultural intermediaries. Through their developed expertise to identify ‘cool’ boundary objects, they are able to engage in multiple media production practices to demonstrate the value of those objects to their large audiences. Examples of this practice include Zoella who often engages her audience with the products from her latest shopping haul (revealing the contents of one’s shopping bag), Evan’s Tube who engages his younger audience with an ‘unboxing’ of the latest Lego kit, or Fun for Louis who is often travelling to exotic locations to reveal its most appealing side. In each instance of these social influencers producing content, they engage in high levels of media literacy to transfer the value of the chosen product or service to their large fan base: a trustworthy, word of mouth news sharing technique. They will typically do this across a number of social media platforms, including their TikTok channel for the behind-the-scenes content, the Instagram platform for the ‘hype’ photo or Insta-Story, and a YouTube video to engage their largest audience.

The second emerging aspect of cultural intermediation is the algorithmic arena, which to a large extent describes how automation is undertaken across digital media platforms. As Gillespie (2014: 167) notes, algorithms “are encoded procedures for transforming input data into a desired output, based on specified calculations”. Within a media ecology that sees significantly more content produced than can be consumed, algorithms, in one sense, are seen as mechanisms to assist users in finding and consuming content that is relevant to their interests. In most cases, this manifests as a recommender system, which is represented as ‘Recommended for you’, ‘Up Next’ or ‘You will Like’ types of automated mechanisms. However, there is an increasing body of literature, which is described in detail below, that challenges the bias, power and relationships with content, society and culture that are represented by automated media systems.

Cultural intermediation that combines both social influencers and algorithms, then, acts as a process for media visibility across emerging networked platforms. What has become the process of blending private with public media (Meikle, 2016) has, as Turner (2010) highlights through the demotic turn, enabled ordinary folk to become key influential media producers. However, these key actors within cultural intermediation are typically engaging with the content production and distribution process for the social media entertainment (Cunningham and Craig, 2017) benefits such as increased social and economic capital. This cultural intermediation process is operationalised by what I argue is the digital first personality: those individuals that produce digital content for maximum visibility by engaging social influencer publication strategies that appease platform algorithms. In many cases, their media production focus is on commercial products and services to increase their social and economic capital. Within the social influencer genre that excludes fake news and disinformation, public issues, public affairs, news and current affairs, are often ignored in lieu of highly profitable alternatives.

So here is a beginning for a new area of research. I feel as though I have completed my fieldwork in digital agencies for now, but i can see a new space opening up that looks at the intersection of microplatformization and digital first personalities as the backbone of digital intermediation.

Original photo by Dean Rose on Unsplash

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