Virtual Influencers

This book identifies the converging socio-cultural, economic and technological conditions that have shaped, informed and realised the identity of the contemporary virtual influencer, situating them at the intersection of social media, consumer culture and AI, and digital technologies.
Through a critical analysis of virtual influencers and related media practices and discourses in an international context, each chapter investigates different themes relating to digitality and identity: virtual place and nationhood; virtual emotions and intimacy; im/materialities of virtual everyday life; the biopolitics of virtual human-production; the necropolitics of pandemic virtuality; transmedial and mimetic virtualities; and the political economy of virtual influencers. The book argues that the virtual influencer represents the various ways in which contemporary identities have increasingly become naturalised with questions of virtuality, increasingly mediated by digital technologies across multiple realities.
From practices relating to AI-driven, invasive data profiling needed for virtual influencer production, to problematic online practices such as buying digital skin colour, the author examines how the virtual influencer's aesthetic, social and economic value obfuscates some of the darker aspects of their role as an extractivist technology of virtuality: one which regulates, oppresses and/or classifies bodies and datafied bodies that serve the visual, (bio)political and digital economies of virtual capitalism. In the process, the book simultaneously offers a critique of the virtual influencer as a representational virtual figure existing across multiple digital platforms, spaces and times, and how they may challenge, complicate and reinforce normative ideologies surrounding gender, race, class, sexuality, age and ableism. As such, the book sheds light to some of the more troubling realities of the virtual influencer's existence, inasmuch as it celebrates their transformational potential, exploring the implications of both within an increasingly AI-driven, digital culture, society and economy.
Drawing from a wide range of disciplines, this book will appeal to scholars, researchers and students working in the area(s) of: Popular Culture and Media; Internet, Digital and Social Media Studies; Data justice and Governance; Japanese Media Studies, Celebrity Studies; Fan Studies; Marketing and Consumer Studies; Sociology; Human-Computer Studies; and AI and Technology Studies.