In attending the Jeffree Star Princess Polly live event, I hoped to convey the characteristics of this particular fandom and demonstrate how the online persona of a social media influencer can often times be different to that of their real-life personality. This was demonstrated through my personal conversion from previously having no interest in Jeffree Star to becoming a huge fan of the YouTube sensation.
Now it is time to delve into the specifics of how I plan to conduct my ethnographic research. Firstly, I decided to focus on one beauty guru in particular, in order to easily conduct research relating to a specific fandom. I have chosen to focus on Jeffree Star, who isan American internet celebrity, makeup artist, entrepreneur, and musician. He is also the founder and owner of Jeffree Star Cosmetics, of which, he subsequently promotes on YouTube, where he has amassed more than 10 million subscribers and over 1 billion views, as of 2018.
My choice to focus on Jeffree Star was cemented when my best friend invited me to attend an event, ‘Princess Polly Live Ft. Jeffree Star’. This event was an exclusive 90-minute live beauty event, featuring international makeup icon Jeffree Star, with guest appearances by Australia’s biggest YouTube sensations Michael Finch, Sammy Robinson & Cartia Mallan. Hosted by Ash London, the on-stage performance gave beauty lovers an insight into the world of Jeffree Star with an intimate 20-minute Q&A session, along with a live panel discussion and makeup challenge. Tickets were $80 each and 236 ticket holders had the opportunity to meet & greet Jeffree Star.
Before being invited to the event, I was not a fan of Jeffree star. Not for any particular reason, I simply had not been exposed to his YouTube videos as much as my friends had, however, I still knew who he was and was aware of his makeup brand and the type of content he produced. Thus, I thought attending the event would be a great idea for my ethnographic study.
I was inspired by a past project in in BCM241 that focused on fandom produced by Kristin Campbell, and as such, decided to use video and audio as my platform to present my findings. When I attended the event, I took my camera along and shot vlog style clips, keeping with the theme of YouTube beauty gurus. I included clips of myself, my friends, other fans, the products and merchandise available to purchase at the event, as well as exclusive clips from the Q&A session with Jeffree Star himself, in which, he discussed his social media success, which I thought would be perfect to include in my video.
Now that I have attended the event and filmed a variety of footage that shows the type of fandom surrounding Jeffree Star, I plan to sit down and film an autoethnography to include in my video. In this autoethnography, I will observe the footage and reflect on what I saw and experienced at the Princess Polly event. I also plan to reflect on my own attitude towards Jeffree Star and the other youtubers and discuss how my views of particular influencers have changed since experiencing them in real life as opposed to online. I will also interview other fans to gauge different perspectives.
Conclusively, I will produce a vlog style video that draws conclusions based on the fandom surrounding Jeffree star, and how it is, he managed to build such a large following, by way of social media. The video will include footage from the event I attended, as well as my own opinions and observations. I will also interview my friends who attended the event who were fans of Jeffree star prior to the event, in order to find out what it is that attracts them to someone who has made a living purely by posting videos on YouTube.
I have always been interested in fashion and beauty together with the lifestyles of those I aspire to be like. Typically, icons worthy of our aspiration are recognised celebrities inclusive of Beyoncé, Britney spears, Leonardo DiCaprio and the like. Though, with the proliferation of social media, it seems people do not have to be generically famous to retain a substantial following.
Since the age of 10, I have been a frequent user of the social media platform; YouTube. I am ‘subscribed’ to countless individuals who post videos ranging from makeup tutorials, fashion look books and first impressions of products, to simple vlogs that narrate the content creator’s daily activities and allow me to virtually follow them around, experiencing their day to day lives.
YouTube’s ‘beauty community’ is made up of individuals who create videos relating to all things fashion, beauty and lifestyles. While this is a niche selection of videos, as compared to the endless amounts of content available on YouTube, the popularity of these types of videos and this community as whole, has grown rapidly over the past few years. This has inspired me to carry out an ethnographic study relating to the fandom surrounding social media ‘influencers’, specifically those who are a part of the YouTube ‘beauty community’.
Recently it occurred to me that, not only do I watch individual’s videos on YouTube, I also follow these ‘influencers’ on other social media platforms and allow them to saturate my Instagram, Twitter, Snapchat and Facebook. This is what led me to the idea for my ethnographic study. I wanted to decipher what it is that labels someone a social media ‘influencer’, what the criteria is and how it is that these people who post YouTube videos and promote brands via social media have a following as big as generic celebrities such as Kim Kardashian or Kylie Jenner.
Through my ethnographic study, I hope to explore how it is that ‘self-made celebrities’ who began their careers by posting YouTube videos, have managed to accumulate such a large following and fan base. I wish to focus on these fans and I also wish to explore how the idea of the typical ‘Screaming female fan’ often described as ‘fanatic’, has been subverted, when it comes to fandoms surrounding homosexual and transgender beauty gurus, which takes away the concept of hysteria created by girls who long to be romantically involved with their male celebrity crushes.
Fan content around makeup is among the most lucrative because of makeups core relationship to consumption cultures, branding and structures of capital. Branded makeup products used in the videos of beauty gurus and the consumption surrounding them, indoctrinates fans into both the ideologies of fandom and postfeminist consumer citizenship (The Routledge Companion to Media Fandom). The same can be said for fashion, but I question how youtubers and social media influencers can become notable by posting vlogs, that consist of clips of what the induvial had for breakfast, their morning routine, them hanging out with friends and other typical every day activities, that I myself am guilty of being interested in. Often, these content creators are ordinary people, not unlike myself. Often these people are the same gender, same age and have the same interests and lifestyle as me, so what is it that makes them special enough to be labelled an ‘influencer’ and consequently have their own fans, and what is it that drives these fans to be dedicated to seemingly ‘ordinary’ people?
“Love me tender, love me sweet, never let me go. You have made my life complete and I love you so.”
Oh, how the world has changed since 1956. The year that Elvis Presley released the chart topping, ‘Love me tender’. The 1950’s saw the concept of love and relationships romanticised and intimacy consisted of courtship and hand holding. Today, we have become acclimatised to ‘screened intimacy’, with the proliferation of the internet and social media, making way for the rise in popularity of online dating as a preferred method of meeting ‘the one’.
The growth of the internet and various social media applications has transformed the way, in which, we initiate and maintain personal relationships. Messages, photographs, videos and texts can all be exchanged through cyberspace, in an effort to impress the recipient in the hopes of scoring a date. The process of finding and encountering romance is fundamentally different to the ‘love me tender’ days, as new forms of media allow for individualised needs to be met, in terms of a preferred way to meet and pursue new people.
With 20,000 new downloads each day (Wortham, 2013), Tinder has, arguably, become the most popular dating application with over 10 million daily users, looking for that special someone. The name itself, together with the bonfire icon that accompanies the brand name, insinuates that once users have found a match, sparks will inevitably fly and ignite the fires of passion.
This insinuation, however, was not the result of my most recent Tinder encounter. Upon matching on Tinder, myself and ‘he who shall not be named’, began conversing via the applications messaging system. We then continued this conversation on various other social media outlets, inclusive of Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram. After chatting online, on and off for a couple of months, we finally decided it was time to bite the bullet and meet up, face to face (dun dun dun).
Upon arrival to our date location and meeting each other for the first time, it was clear that there was, however assured by the name and icon of the Tinder application, no spark between the two of us. After the initial date, we both agreed not to see each other again, although we have remained friends till this day (online that is).
This experience, to Elvis Presley, would surely, have seemed otherworldly, meeting someone initially online, with chemistry flying across text messages, to having absolutely no chemistry at all in the real, physical world. This auto ethnographic recount of a failed tinder date has informed my thinking about how we understand the concept of screened intimacies and why people feel more comfortable conversing online as opposed to in person. It has also prompted me to ponder on why it is it may seem as though there is chemistry between two people in an online setting, but when tasked with meeting and maintaining conversation in the real world, this is evidently not the case.
To my failed tinder date, I thank you for being my muse for this blogpost, for without you I would have never known awkward silence like I did that day.
References
Sumter, S 2017, ‘Love me Tinder: Untangling emerging adults’ motivations for using the dating application Tinder’ Telematics and Informatics, Vol. 34, No. 1, pp. 3-7
James, J 2015,’ MOBILE DATING IN THE DIGITAL AGE: COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIP BUILDING ON TINDER’ Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 1-21
David, G 2016, ‘Screened Intimacies: Tinder and the Swipe Logic’ Social Media and Society, Vol. 1, No.11, pp. 1-5
My mother’s cinema going experience, at my age, was extremely different to that, of my own. Back then, going to the ‘pictures’ was all the rage, while these days, there is a vast decline in cinema attendance due to the proliferation of television and movie streaming services. This decline can also be attributed to pirating and the trend of illegal downloads of all things media and entertainment.
Swedish geographer, Torsten Hagerstrand developed the time geography model as a way of gaining perspective on spatial and temporal processes and events such as social interaction, ecological interaction, social and environmental change, and biographies of individuals. The model consists of three constraints inclusive of capability constraints, coupling constraints and authority constraints. Each constraint seeks to explain limitations on peoples experience with particular spaces and can be used in relation to the weeks topic of cinema.
When I asked my mum to relay her most memorable cinema experience as a child, in an attempt to conduct an ethnographic study, she recounted her childhood, living across the road from a drive-in cinema. She told me the story of her and her friends slipping underneath the gates of the drive in and setting up camp next to one of the speakers, on a pole, and watching the movie. While this was a sweet anecdote, I opted to ask her about another experience she recalled of the cinema. One that wasn’t illegal.
Bambi was the first movie my mother remembers seeing at the cinemas. At 8 years old, my mother was taken by her own mother, on an hour train trip to the cinema in Parramatta. This hour train trip relates directly to Hagerstrand’s authority constraints which includes location. These days it takes me ten minutes to get to my local shopping centre, which also happens to be home to my local movie theatre.
In relation to authority constraints, she (my mother) remembers a very strict no talking rule, and while she remembers advertisements showing before the film, she doesn’t remember any ads prompting viewers to turn off their mobile phones, like we see in the cinemas today, as they simply didn’t have mobile phones back when my mum was a child.
In regards to capability constraints, mum said the movies were expensive and she was only able to attend as a treat, every once in a while. This is quite different to my experience of cinema going, as I attend the movies quite often and not as the result of any particular occasion.
Finally, focusing on coupling restraints, mum recalls the movies not being open very late, “definitely not as late as they are these days”. She also said the scheduling was less frequent and the movies only showed once or twice per day.
As for the experience of the movie itself, let’s just say there were tears when (SPOILER ALERT) Bambi’s mum died, and mum now claims to be traumatised by the movie.
So, it seems, Hagerstrand’s model is applicable to any space, inclusive of the cinema space, of which, has changed dramatically since the good old days of Bambi screening once a day and having to take an hour train trip, only to cry and never want to watch the movie again.
References
When prompted to think about my own media and internet usage I thought about the social media applications I use on a daily basis, why I use them and how they have enhanced my life or provided me with opportunities outside of aimlessly scrolling to cure my boredom.
Brandtzaeg suggests that the most common reason people use social networking sites or applications is to get in contact with new people with 31% of participants identifying this as their main reason. The second most valued was to keep in touch with their friends (21%), whereas the third was general socializing (14%).These statistics assisted me in understanding my own incentives driving my use of social media. Initially, I considered my motivations to be to keep in contact with friends and to share parts of my life with others. When I dug deeper into the reasons behind my internet use, I realised I had gained a lot from applications such as Facebook, Instagram and snapchat.
Often teenagers and those finding themselves a part of younger generations are frowned upon for their excessive use of internet and social media, but, in my opinion, those who are judging us are unaware of the benefits of making connections, through thorough use of media. Such tools allow individuals to build relationships with people through common interests and allow for increased confidence in social interaction. While social media is most commonly used for staying in touch with friends and family, making connections and sharing information, it can also be used to take advantage of opportunities presented, even if they are unexpected and perhaps hard to come by.
In January of this year, I was out of a job and desperately looking to find one. Watching peoples ‘stories’ on Snapchat, I came across one, posted by a girl I had no personal connection to, but happened to be connected to on snapchat. The post was an advertisement for a casual position at a café not too far from my house. The image was a screenshot taken from a Facebook status, shared by the owner of the café. From the snapchat story, I searched the name of the café on Facebook and found the post advertising the job. Included, was an email address to send my resume to. Upon sending my resume I received a reply back asking me to attend an interview and a trial and the rest is history. I have now been working at the café for 8 months and love it.
This particular experience, based purely off my use of social media, was one that was a completely unexpected opportunity. It came about, simply, through the connections I had formed with people on social networking applications. Connecting with seemingly random people allowed me to land a job that I have since come to enjoy. Thus, although my motivations as a social networking user are, often times, to simply cure my boredom, talk to my friends and socialise, I am always looking to take advantage of opportunities, that, in hindsight, wouldn’t be possible without the aimless scrolling and seemingly unwarranted use of social media.
References
Australian Bureau of Statistics 2016,Household Use of Information Technology, Australia, 2012-13, Viewed 13 August 2018, <http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Lookup/DE28AB7779067AACCA257C89000E3F98?opendocument>
Brandtzaeg, P 2009, ‘Why People Use Social Networking Sites’ Online Communities and Social Computing, pp. 143-152
In the first BCM241 tutorial of the semester, discussion revolved around television and memories. Common conversation was concerned with personal memories and experiences involving the viewing of television programs. A particular conversation I found myself immersed in was one that surrounded the lack of real time viewing of television programs in contemporary times, with streaming services allowing us to view programs at our own convenience, as opposed to sitting idly in-front of the TV awaiting the new episode of the most popular new show.
With the prolific popularity of streaming services such as Netflix, Stan and Hayu, the television experience has become much less communal in conjunction with becoming increasingly accessible, shifting the social sphere of viewing and flipping it on its head. Such services allow individuals to watch and rewatch television and movies at their own leisure, giving those who cannot view their favourite television program at a conventional time, the chance to enjoy TV, just as much as those who can.
Despite my initial concurrence with the idea that program streaming is a new concept that has allowed for improved access to television, the more I pondered, the more I realised, watching television at a time after the program has aired and being able to watch a particular program, movie or episode over again, is not such a new advancement. This realisation brings me to share my earliest television memory.
In the year 2000, At the age of 3, I was a self-declared Brittany Spears fanatic. So, when the pop stars ‘You Drive me Crazy World Tour’ aired on television, and I was too young to stay up past my bedtime and watch it, naturally, I was devastated. My mother, being the woman, she is, recorded the entire concert on a VHS tape, and, from that point on, the concert was immortalised. I would watch Britney perform over and over, begging mum to rewind the tape so I could perfect the exact dance moves and outfit choices made by the pop star, I so desperately wanted to be.
This process of watching and rewatching reminded me a lot of how I watch television now. The same principles apply to watching Netflix, online, as they do to busting out an ancient VHS tape and recording, playing and rewinding. Both streaming processes allow the viewer to access media at any time, personalising and allowing for the individualisation of the television experience.
Though, while I assert that these two concepts of streaming, both past and present, are quite similar in nature, I do agree that streaming, at the present time, reduces the need for pre-planning: you decide what you want to watch, and as long as you’re connected, you can do it right that second, even if the show you want to see aired last week. This flexibility increases convenience, allows for the infiltration of previously off-limits contexts, and removes the felt necessity to watch a certain program at a certain time in a certain place.Although the VHS tape allowed for the process of watching and rewatching at convenient times, it didn’t allow for the reduction of pre planning in order to record the desired program.
So, it is, that I argue, television streaming has always been around, not always in the form of specialised streaming services, like that of Netflix, but in more basic forms as purchasing a blank VHS tape, pressing record and reusing the tape to record over when you got sick of watching the Britney Spears concert. (That never happened).
Either way, streaming, via VHS or through new and improved technologies, has increased the scope of television, completely changing the dynamic. Gone are the days of predetermined viewing times and here are the days where it is perfectly acceptable to watch your favourite television series at 2am, chatting about it with friends, while trying to avoid sharing spoilers because you’ve watched more episodes than them.
References
Jones, E 2009, ‘Network Television Streaming Technologies and the Shifting Television Social Sphere’ Media in Transition 6: Stone and Papyrus, Storage and Transmission. Vol. 6 pp. 3-9
Having been an avid Instagram user for a few years now, I remember the days before social media influencers were set for world domination. Now, as I scroll through Instagram of a night time, just before I fall asleep, my feed, stories and dreams are filled with collaborations between brands and influencers promoting clothing, accessories, beauty products and every material object known to man kind.
Shani Grimmond and Lily Brown promote clothing brand Beginning Boutique along with Michael Finch who also promotes tanning solution Bondi Sands. Meanwhile Tammy Hembrow promotes womens sports nutrition brand Women’s Best, photographed holding the product whilst wearing, and, thus, promoting her own activewear label, ‘Saski Collection’. Such collaborations are often times visibly labeled with the caption ‘paid partnership’, confirming that these influencers are, in fact, receiving funds for the advertisement of these products, but, this is not always the case.
Recently, I have become increasingly interested in fashion, photography and videography and have begun to take what I post on Instagram, amongst other social media applications, a lot more seriously. As such, I noticed when I became a more prominent figure on Instagram and my online presence began to grow, like the social media influencers I follow, I too, began to receive DM’s (Direct Messages) from brands, asking me to collaborate with them.
After the initially feeling ‘oh so famous’, I quickly began to notice each brand that had reached out to me was merely offering a discount on their products, rather than a traditional collaboration, involving an exchange of goods for services. While these brands offer potential increased exposure, inclusive of gaining followers and likes, this is likely never achieved by anyone who agrees to such collaborations, as in reality, these brands are asking you to spend money on their products as well as asking you to give THEM exposure by tagging the brand in your posts allowing your followers, usually in excess of 1000 people, to become familiar with the brand.
These misleading messages make instagram users, like myself, believe that in order to gain exposure, they must collaborate with brands with a larger following than themselves. In my opinion, Instagram has become a breeding ground for con artistry. No longer is the application about self-expression, through means of the uploading of images, it is about gaining popularity, presenting false, unrealistic images of ones life to an audience, and instagram has also turned in to a collaboration station, minus the actual collaboration.
Will this stop me from continuing to use the application, taking photos specifically to post on there? Honestly, probably not.
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