Abstract
Keywords
Sophie Bishop’s (2025) Influencer Creep speaks to the performative demands and dilemmas of contemporary digital culture. This is not a book about social media filters or hashtags or brand sponsorship. It is a book that forces an existential reckoning with what it means to be human today, when who we are and how we are are intimately bound up with the platformisation of emotional labour and the machinery of surveillance capitalism (He and Agur, 2025; Baym, 2015; Zuboff, 2019). It asks readers to consider what happens to us – and to the project of self-making – when ‘promotional social media practices… become increasingly central to the ways we all live our lives online’ (Bishop, 2025: 1).
Indeed, the practices Bishop describes are so pervasive and mainstream that the task of drawing a meaningful distinction between the influencer industry, on the one hand, and what it is to be alive in a digitally saturated society, on the other, proves extremely difficult. The operative boundary between content creator and civilian has all but disappeared. And that’s one of the book’s key points.
In locating how influencer logics seep into everyday life, Influencer Creep is also a project about cultural continuity and change. Scholars have long focused on mass media as pedagogical devices that teach audiences how to be and what to aspire to. And while the field has come a long way since Horkheimer and Adorno ’s (1944) highbrow dismissal of popular culture’s political potentiality, Bishop’s work makes clear that Frankfurt School battles about cultural value and legitimacy are alive and well.
For many, even the word ‘influencer’ has a derogatory edge (Bishop, 2025: 13). In Bishop’s case, that may have been the reason her PhD proposal was initially rejected, its focus on influencers deemed insufficiently serious. This snobbery makes the business of influencing fraught and fascinating. This is an industry that brings in huge sums of money off the back of the very people it denigrates. Bishop encapsulates this irony in a scene from Milan Fashion Week in 2016. There, a group of Vogue editors flout their cultural capital by talking shit about the fashion bloggers who’ve come to town, ‘“trolling” the streets’ in their ‘paid-to-wear outfits’ (Bishop, 2025: 87). Fast forward to 2020, and beauty influencer James Charles lands the cover of Vogue Portugal (Stiegman, 2020).
Influencer Creep also points to the continued centrality of risk in today’s datafied world (nb. Beck, 1992; Mejias and Couldry, 2019). Risk is a fixture of digital culture’s political economy, where value is linked to visibility. Being seen is vital and the stakes are high. Contemporary digital culture thereby normalises the anxiety that comes from living with (and for) the camera. We might all be influencers now, but that also means we may all have generalised anxiety disorder.
This observation is important because it helps us spot influencer creep in the most mundane of settings, like the bedrooms of young girls obsessing over which selfie to post. Here, Bishop’s research resonates with Rosalind Gill’s book Perfect (2023), which documents the pervasive fear of getting it wrong that accompanies young people’s social media practices. Taken together, Bishop and Gill show that digital visibility is a high-risk undertaking, whether one monetises it or not.
For the digitally savvy entrepreneur, Bishop depicts a world in which people want to be perceived because their livelihoods depend on it. It’s a world in which online visibility is a commercial methodology of self-making. Herein, the line between the personal and professional is again intentionally difficult to make out.
If this sounds familiar, blame reality TV. Its playbook has long emphasised the discursive and commercial power of performing ‘realness’ (Banet-Weiser, 2012; Hearn, 2008; Marwick, 2013). As Emily Hund (2023: 21–22) observes, ‘reality television… helped centralize the notion of authenticity’, and its most successful practitioners soon learned to commodify it (nb. Senft, 2008). It is fitting, then, that Bishop’s book opens with a shoutout to The Real Housewives and Below Deck. This is a clever starting point for a project that grapples with what it takes to make a living in today’s social media ecosystem – an ecosystem grounded in the mythology of amateurism.
Bishop shows that authenticity is vital to that mythology and to the influencer’s commercial efficacy. In the relentless content avalanche we call social media, performing realness helps one cut through the noise. At the same time, it also enables one to paper over the tremendous power advertisers have in the creator economy (Bishop, 2025: 139). As Bishop demonstrates, convincingly and consistently performing a sensibility of ‘being real’ is how influencers obscure the ‘paradoxical tension between creativity and commerce’ that sits at the heart of the industry (ibid.: 107). Here, subjectivity formation is bound up with this smoke-and-mirrors show and the ‘multisited pressures for influencers to build and maintain authenticity’ (ibid.).
Not every influencer’s authenticity is a strength, however. Realness is an asset only insofar as it doesn’t set off any brand safety tripwires. This is one of the creator economy’s defining tyrannies: the ability to put one’s authenticity to work requires conforming to specific registers of advertiser-approved visibility and platform-endorsed norms (Bishop, 2025: 132). The successful self-brand is built by performing respectability and delivering affective comfort to audiences. This radically narrows the aperture for the kinds of authenticities that get platformed and monetised (ibid.: 88). It is also why you rarely see an angry influencer. Difficult emotions are not yet commercially desirable.
Bishop shows that the palliative dictates of self-branding extend even to moments of rupture. When influencers are caught behaving badly, for instance, they seem to invariably respond by recording a formulaic apology video. Bishop draws reader attention to the templatisation of ‘authentic’ regret in the platform economy, and the genre conventions by which self-brands do reputational repair.
Importantly, not every influencer has the privilege of repairing reputational harm. Some influencers are unable to establish a reputation in the first place. For example, if you happen to be a sex worker on TikTok or an antiracism activist on Instagram, knowing the rules of algorithmic optimisation does not guarantee successful (i.e. monetisable) platform recognition. By locating which influencers and which types of content ‘perform well’ – and which are demonetised, shadowbanned or otherwise censured – analysts can begin to understand whose identities platform capitalism values (nb. Srnicek, 2017). Bishop’s research thus prompts us to consider the myriad ways that inequality circumscribes the algorithmic visibility game.
Bishop also captures the disavowal that scaffolds digital culture’s visibility imperative. The ability to ‘game the algorithm’ is mission critical and one needs considerable algorithmic know-how to make it in the highly competitive creator economy. But unless you’re an optimisation influencer, the content creator must never publicly flaunt her algorithmic expertise. That’s because the influencer’s legitimacy hinges on being read as ‘real’, and the credibility of one’s authenticity is threatened by showing algorithmic competence. This means influencers must deploy the ‘most efficient tactics available’ to boost their platform visibility whilst obscuring their use of those same tactics (Bishop, 2025: 33). In other words, the backstage of influencer labour aims at maximising the appearance of amateurism and relatability on the front stage (Goffman, 1959; Hochschild, 1983). No matter how sophisticated one’s grasp of optimisation might be, the influencer’s success depends on convincingly performing algorithmic not-knowing. This sleight-of-hand feels appropriate in our anti-expert conjuncture (Hasell and Chinn, 2023).
Bishop refers to influencers as canaries in the coal mine (2025: 15) and in its painstaking analysis of that coal mine, Influencer Creep makes a significant contribution to how we might theorise subjectivity formation in the age of surveillance capitalism. What kind of self emerges from an algorithmic imaginary that celebrates relatability and an algorithmic reality that commodifies that relatability? This question transcends the creator economy and gets at the wider costs of in living in, with and through pervasive hyperconnectivity. This is not (just) about digital culture’s business model. It’s about the consequences of that business model becoming an operating manual for how to be.
To drive this point home, Bishop cites Arlie Hochschild’s seminal book, The Managed Heart (1983), which famously explored the emotional labour performed by air stewardesses and how this bled into workers’ lives off the clock. There, Hochschild asks, ‘when a worker abandons her smile, what kind of tie remains between her smile and herself?’ (in Bishop, 2025: 94). In the age of algorithmic self-branding and digital culture’s authenticity imperative, this haunting question is as confronting and visceral as ever. It makes cogent the stakes of understanding – and resisting – the systems and ideology of influencer creep.
