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**Rachel Berrymanâ??s Exploration of Virtual Influencers and their Impact on Social Media**
Rachel Berryman, a diligent Ph.D. candidate in Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia, explores the intriguing world of virtual influencers on social media platforms, presenting an overview of her innovative project titled “Analyzing Virtual Influences: Celebrity Authenticity and Identity on Social Media.” Rachel begins by paying homage to the traditional custodians of the lands where she resides and conducts her studies, showing respect to the Wajak people of the Noongar nation.
In her enlightening exploration, Rachel delves into the nuances of virtual influencers, defining them as unique entities native to social media, meticulously designed to amass and capitalize on audience attention. Her investigation reveals the proliferative evolution of these digital entities since the late 2010s, illustrating their growing role in endorsing diverse brands and verticals and their burgeoning global presence. Rachel discusses the current scholarly landscape surrounding virtual influencers, pointing out the existing focus on aspects such as marketing utility, consumer perceptions, and their relationship to cultural identity, ethics, misinformation, digital fashion, and more.
Rachel’s project is not just a snapshot of the current state of virtual influencers but aims to provide a comprehensive perspective on the phenomenon, considering the characters, their creators, and the burgeoning industry surrounding them, forming a foundational base for subsequent academic pursuits. She provides a glimpse into the historical pathways that have shaped virtual influencers, emphasizing their intersection with various historical trajectories of virtual beings, which have bestowed upon them a celebrity status.
Rachel’s methodological approach is anchored in Kathy Charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory, integrating a diverse array of qualitative methods such as online interviews, participation at industry events, and multi-sided digital ethnography, particularly focusing on emerging virtual influencer markets in East Asia and Latin America. She scrutinizes virtual influencers as amalgamations of social, cultural, and industrial practices, primarily native to digital and networked technologies. Through meticulous visual cross-platform analysis, Rachel aspires to unravel the intricate semiotic meanings, embedded compositions, and unique platform cultures of the collected social media content.
She elucidates her approach using the case of Emma, a widely-recognized virtual influencer from Japan, to illustrate the multifaceted online presence of such entities across various platforms, emphasizing the importance of examining each platform to understand the nuanced identities being constructed. Each digital artifact created by virtual influencers, Rachel explains, is a meticulous amalgamation of extensive planning, strategic choices, and polished crafting, designed to resonate with the character’s brand and narrative, revealing processes often obscured in human influencers.
Rachel concludes her presentation with a thoughtful provocation on the intricate and planned nature of content created by virtual influencers, inviting scholars and social media researchers to delve deeper into this fascinating realm. She encourages intellectual collaboration and discussions, extending an invitation to connect on Twitter and her website, where more details about her enlightening project and other research endeavors can be found.