My First-Ever Instagram Influencer
My First-Ever Instagram Influencer
The part of the LEAP 2 process with which I was most immediately comfortable was predictable: connecting our chosen digital author (Sharon McMahon of @sharonsaysso on Instagram) to the readings we’ve been doing. It was quickly clear that McMahon may be the quintessential example of a “microcelebrity”: an “ordinary [person] who [has] gathered a substantial number of followers or subscribers on [a] social media [platform] (Martinez and Olsson, 2019, p. 36). She may even have crossed over into celebrity status, minus the “micro,” in that she is a cross-platform phenomenon with a podcast and a website that offers merchandise and fee-based workshop services, and that shows her to have a staff that helps to run her budding multimedia empire. In fact, the terms “followers” and “subscribers” are insufficient to capture McMahon’s Instagram community. The people she dubs “Governerds” collectively embody the kind of “imaginative public” defined by Henry Jenkins (2018) via Sonia Livingstone (p. 17).
The ways in which McMahon utilizes the techniques of vloggers called to mind everything we’ve read in Hobbs (2017) and Balleys et al. (2020). Although McMahon is not a YouTuber per se, and is not primarily addressing a teenage audience, it is fair to say that, to use the phrasing of Balleys et al., “intimacy” is indeed “at the heart of the recognition process” here (p. 4). In our video, Colleen and I refer specifically to the ways in which McMahon creates the kind of parasocial relationship defined by Hobbs (p. 171). Indeed, when Hobbs describes how close-ups using direct address, if framed effectively, can communicate the ethos of the creator to the creator’s community (pp. 175–176), she could very well use McMahon as a case in point.
The arena of the project with which I was least comfortable going in was the video side of things. That’s one reason my being partnered with Colleen ended up being so helpful. Colleen and I were in EDC 532 together last semester, and had been in touch between semesters about a PBS web education series with which she works, so the pairing seemed to make sense before I knew anything specific about working with her. As it turns out, her combination of a laid-back “we’ll get this done” approach with a deadline-oriented take on calendar/schedule fits extremely well with the work processes I’ve developed working in the PK-12 world–and her comfort with the basics of pairing audio and video, regardless of platform and tools, relieved any pressure I felt about making images fit the script and audio.
I have long been comfortable writing scripts for various kinds of audiences and “stages,” and I’m happy to rehearse, revise, record, and re-record. Having too many ideas and too many words for a given time frame or word count doesn’t particularly faze me; when between us we had over 1100 words, and we wanted to cut that by at least 40%, I could see places and ways to do that. When we were looking at the sheer volume of possible images to use, on the other hand, I wasn’t as quick to see patterns and a sort of story-flow in the way Colleen was.
I suppose the most important “new ideas” that have occurred to me during this process have been somewhat obvious ones for a person who tends to limit dramatically his time spent in social-media spaces. I wonder if there are online communities I’m “missing out on” in which I might enjoy spending time, or at least from which I might learn. That turns into the more pragmatic question, “How can I add a bit of weekly time on Instagram and/or Twitter while still maintaining my overall goal of staying away from screens during many of my non-working hours?” After all, my “day job,” my work with the Journal of Media Literacy Education, my work as a publishing writer, and my work for the URI grad certificate all have me on screens for many hours every day. There has to be a line somewhere, and I’m still working on where to draw it.
Our video:
References for this essay:
Balleys, C., Millerand, F., Thoër, C., & Duque, N. (2020). Searching for
oneself on YouTube: Teenage peer socialization and social recognition
processes. Social Media+ Society, 6(2), 2056305120909474.
Hobbs, R. (2017), Create to Learn. Malden: Wiley Blackwell.
Jenkins, H. (2018). Fandom, negotiation, and participatory culture. In P.
Booth (Ed), A Companion to Media Fandom and Fan Studies (pp. 13–26).
Routledge.
Martínez, C., & Olsson, T. (2019). Making sense of YouTubers: how
Swedish children construct and negotiate the YouTuber Misslisibell as a
girl celebrity. Journal of Children and Media, 13(1), 36–52.
References for the video: https://docs.google.com/document/d/11EbWLgQnESAUKH1STcI4-3YauRXKhsC0saQ2HLg6Il4/edit
