Priya Varrier, and economics of social media stardom

Ah, the girl in the ‘wink’ video!

The same. The young Malayalam actress attained overnight stardom after a video clip from her film, depicting puppy love at school, went viral on social media. In the process, she’s earned a huge cache of ‘celebrity capital’.

What’s ‘celebrity capital’?

In a 2013 research paper, sociologist Olivier Driessens noted that celebrity capital, or broadly recognisability, is conceptualised as accumulated media visibility, which results from recurrent media representations, of the sorts that Varrier has been subjected to in recent weeks. Media research specialist Barrie Gunter, in his book Celebrity Capital: Assessing the Value of Fame , states that celebrities possess a social status of sorts, which can be transformed into influence in other spheres. That status manifests itself in many ways.

Such as?

Well, Varrier has garnered, virtually overnight, 4.5 million followers on Instagram. That’s more followers than Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has.

But isn’t that a flaky measure of fame?

You’d think so, but in a world which puts a premium on people who are “famous for being famous”, this status can be leveraged in countless ways. A celebrity may be, as historian and social theorist Daniel J Boorstin noted, “a person who is known for his well-knownness”; but celebrities are also embodiments of “a more abstract kind of capital: attention”, as sociologist Robert van Krieken observed in his book Celebrity Society . In fact, there’s a whole strand of discourse devoted to studying ‘attention economics’.

Whoa, what’s that?

As Olivier Budzinski, professor of economic theory at the Institute of Economics at Ilmenau University of Technology, Germany, and Sophia Gaenssle note in their hot-off-the-presses research paper, ‘The Economics of Social Media Stars’, from an economic point of view, attention can be described as a scarce resource in an information-rich society. And those who have heightened visibility, like Varrier, become social media ‘influencers’.

And her ‘fan following’ can be monetised?

Driessens writes that ‘celebrity capital’ can be converted into economic capital as money (for instance through merchandising), into social capital as valuable contacts (through, for instance, increased access to previously closed networks), into symbolic capital as recognition, or into political capital as power.

But do celebrity endorse-ments have any value?

You bet. Celebrities are seen to create audiences and markets not only for themselves, but also for commodities and brand images that they endorse. Writing about the “economics of influence” that “social media super stars” command, Toby Eberly, executive vice-president of brand-building agency Hanlon Creative, cites studies that establish that digital “influencers” have enormous leverage. Content that they post on social media platforms, for instance, is viewed about six times longer than digital display ads. Influencers’ content also improves search engine optimisation, the mantra for heightened visibility on the internet.

The digital ‘influencers’ reach seems hyped up…

But the real-world experience of brands is that traditional banner ads on the web are being ignored, and instead, consumers are seeking word-of-mouth recommendataions from someone they ‘trust’ – and celebrities qualify.

Bottomline?

As Driessens notes, the Internet and social media have given ordinary people greater access to platforms where they could become celebrities. Like Varrier did.

When will my number come up?

Here’s a humbling thought: “if everyone were famous, then no one would be famous.”

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