UC Press Blog

By Sophie Bishop, author of Influencer Creep: How Optimization, Authenticity, and Self-Branding Transform Creative Culture

When my book Influencer Creep was about to be published, my publicist suggested I set up a Google alert for topics related to the book, to help us make timely ‘newsy’ pitches. The Google alert for ‘influencer’ received dozens of pings a day, perhaps unsurprisingly because influencers are professional creators who garner audience attention for a living. I was fascinated with the picture of influencer culture being painted through these pings. The Daily Mail reported that influencers were now banned from London’s foodie Borough Market, colourfully describing scenes of creators being dragged out of the market by security for reviewing viral pastries without permission. In another Daily Mail article, it was reported that an Australian influencer strapped himself to the roof of a commuter subway by cellophane in a stunt intended to sell clothes. The Mail reports that this incident left commuters “confused”.  A Buzzfeed article documented ‘bizarre’ influencer behaviour, including one creator trying to get his ER bill covered by doing a ‘collab’ (to which the doctor responds “look around – do you think this ER needs advertising’). 

In these articles, influencer culture is derided and dismissed. Most of these pieces represent influencers as, at best, annoying and at worse dangerous – there are multiple stories about influencers involved in crimes like drug trafficking or fraud. The tone of the pieces evokes the parody Instagram account ‘Influencers in the Wild’, which reposts humorous ‘backstage’ images of influencers trying to capture their content in public space. There are multiple images on this account of influencers falling face first into the ocean’s swell as they attempt to capture an image of them frolicking against a beautiful sunset. 

But what do we lose when we laugh at influencers? We know that influencer culture goes far beyond being niche or exceptional – influencer marketing will reach $266.92 billion dollars by the end of 2025, and in the UK (where I live) influencers contributed £2.2 billion to the UK economy in 2024 and created 45,000 jobs. I have been studying influencer culture for ten years now – and in my experience, influencers are impactful, serious and smart. I have studied how professional influencers undertake creative work in spite of the challenges brought by social media platforms – how they experience working with algorithms that are difficult to predict and navigate, how they portray their ‘real lives’ and garner their audience trust, how they build a pithy self brand that is attractive to audiences while remaining safe for commercial brands to attach them too. They navigate the pressures of low pay, discrimination and minimal workplace protections. 

I have tracked the strategies and pressures that influencers must navigate – and how these pressures have spilled out beyond the confines of influencer culture into creative work more broadly, using the example of artists and art worlds.

In my book, I have tracked the strategies and pressures that influencers must navigate – how these pressures have spilled out beyond the confines of influencer culture into creative work more broadly, using the example of artists and art worlds. Influencer Creep captures the way that influencing (and its pressures) extends beyond a small subset of online power users and becomes central to more forms of work, and more deeply into the lives and psyche of workers. 

In Influencer Creep, I outline the way that artists borrow from strategies developed by influencers to navigate social media platforms – showing influencers as canaries in the coalmine who experience the challenges and pressures of ‘platformized’ cultural production first.

Although —

Both artists’ and influencers’ relationships to platforms are underpinned by a deep anxiety and stress about the possibility of losing account access, a painstakingly built following, and the potential for wider visibility. Lucilla told me that Instagram had deleted her business account shortly before our interview. “They’ve changed some rules, some legal stuff,” she told me. “And because it didn’t have a personal account connected to me, [my business account] just disappeared. I tried to find help but there’s no help on Instagram.” Lucilla’s observations echo widespread complaints from other influencers about the lack of support they receive from Instagram; platforms maintain complicated systems of governance that are often inscrutable to users.

Because of the central function of Instagram in selling directly to audiences and in addition to the problems of reaching professional intermediaries, the risks of losing access to the platform are acute. Chloe, an illustrator, put it this way: “Quite a few friends of mine have had their Instagram deleted for no apparent reason . . . so I feel like if you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, in that way it can be quite distressing if that happens.” Chloe’s statement directly echoes the points raised in Zoë Glatt’s ethnography of the YouTube creator industry, where platform dependency, or putting all your eggs in one basket, represents a “deep-seated anxiety that a platform that appears to be a pillar of the social media ecology can disappear overnight.” Although artists are not platform-native creators, they have arguably become equally as platform-dependent for income generation as professional influencers are.

The atmosphere of anxiety about accidentally doing something wrong and jeopardizing one’s position on social media—without explanation—represents a distinct layer of platform governance.

The atmosphere of anxiety about accidentally doing something wrong and jeopardizing one’s position on social media—without explanation—represents a distinct layer of platform governance. In this sense artists, like influencers, labor within what Taina Bucher frames as a permanent “threat of invisibility,” where social media platforms maintain power through the capricious ways in which they decide what should and should not be seen. Artists are always on edge. Lena, a knitwear designer, ended up not going through with the launch of a promotional campaign that she had worked hard (and paid significant up-front costs) to create because of an error message she received when she tried to post it on Instagram. “The campaign was great, but I had wanted to put in all the work to create imagery and new products and do it on time, which felt like a big achievement. I wanted to sponsor them because it was quite a structured thing, but it wouldn’t work.”

The risk of being in bad standing with Instagram could jeopardize the future of the account that artists work hard to grow. The tandem features of platform dependency and platform opacity prompt a highly affective self-governing response: artists avoid any circumstance that may affect their platform standing. This adds a new level of governmentality to art worlds and potentially threatens a key part of artists’ creative process—what art sociologist Hannah Wohl calls the “process of experimentation.”