Aura, Identity, and Celebrities in the Digital Age

Introduction As technologies and their dependent media evolve, so too does fan culture. Throughout recent history, fan cultures mobilise behind common causes, as evidenced by the 1893 ‘death’ of Sherlock Holmes and the resounding backlash from black armband-wearing fans begging for his resurrection (Culpepper) on the printed page. The screaming masses of Beatlemania drowning out the band themselves during their performances in the 1960s (Cardany) saw fan culture manifesting at performance sites, driven by television and radio campaigning. This was soon followed by the fan outcry of 1967-68, the so-called ‘first fan campaign’ protesting the possible cancellation of Star Trek after only two seasons (Loehr et al. 307). And following that, the advent of the Star Wars phenomenon, the birth of Comic-Con, the rise of participatory cultures … all prime examples among many of fan culture, technology, and media existing in symbiosis. Now, we are faced with the emerging metaverse and the immediacy (not to mention anonymity) of digital fan cultures, coupled with the influencer phenomenon. This article, rather than presenting a chronology of fan culture and technology’s relationship, will focus on micro-celebrity (Senft 346) and its associated reliance on fan culture. The phenomenon will be interrogated through the lens of auratic perception: an admittedly contentious metric, but one that can be conflated with content, performance and identity as easily as Benjamin originally applied the concept to the arenas of art, technology, and politics in the 1920s. A close reading of relevant scholarship is employed to investigate and ask: can micro-celebrity fan culture be validated in terms of auratic perception, and can a corresponding diminishment in aura be observed in the fragmentation of identity experienced by the auto-exploitative digital identity performances content creators engage in? Micro-Celebrities First, the chief players in this conceptual space must be defined. The contemporary call to commodification is heard nowhere as loudly as in the voice of the influencer. The micro-celebrities of the digital age differ from traditional concepts of celebrity in that they occupy “a state of being famous to a niche group of people, that is also a behavior: the presentation of oneself as a celebrity regardless of who is paying attention” (Marwick 114). The influencer conflates popularity and attention—measured through analytic metrics such as likes, shares, and comments—with commercial success and, through affiliate programmes, attempts to portray lives of aspirational success to their fans and followers (Abidin 72; 79-80). Mass media may not make these content creators, whose personal selves and commodified selves co-exist in a strange synergy, into household names, but their reach often outstrips even that of the ‘traditional’ celebrities of legacy media. Although the dichotomy of creative expression presented by these audience-turned-consumer identities, where the democratic potentiality of a “persistent address to viewer inherently invites feedback” (Burgess identifying multiple informants at work within the separation of image, observer, and site of reception—tradition, context, and time—all imply distance without the need to physically enforce it (Eagleton). Within the digital context, where influencer culture and microcelebrity operate, distance-based aura becomes truly unobtainable. The disregard for spatiotemporal physics that cyberspace characterises reinforces this, as any distance implied when accessing a digital environment is one of modes of being, of physical versus immaterial, presenting an impassable obstacle (Kellerman 505-506). Despite the apparent physical closeness of interaction with a digital space, any engagement is separated by a screen, enforcing this separation. When engaging with the digital, users “resign themselves to never obtaining it, sublimating instead their sensual, consumer desire into ‘contemplation’” (Link 99). However, a substituted aura can be fabricated en masse within these digital spaces through the deployment of emotional trigger tools like nostalgia, recreating the experience of aura, if not the authentic aura itself. Authenticity Authenticity thus becomes the next point of consideration: a “unique apparition of distance” (Benjamin 104) implies authentic presentation, or at the very least a representation of truth. Truth as an ephemeral experience is described by Merleau-Ponty (xxiii) as “not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Benjamin (103) proposes that reproduction (as opposed to the original production of an artefact) via a technological catalyst undermines the authenticity of an original ‘image’ and, as a direct result, diminishes its aura. The reasoning is simple: reproduction results in a multiplicity of copies, but these are not the same as the image itself, merely simulacra or items “having the appearance but not the substance or proper qualities” (Cochrane 183) of the original. What, then, does this mean for a digital context where originality is even harder to establish? It is mentioned above that aura is contingent upon distance—and distance as both a physical and temporal construct is a moot point in the digital domain. Over and above the merely technical affordances, however, the shared (or networked, to be precise) nature of the space occupied implies that whatever artefact—image, performance, or other—is under review, it is synchronously viewed across all networked nodes. When Benjamin (106) noted that “a mass may have been no less suited to public presentation than a symphony” he foresaw how some artistic expressions could, indeed, be received simultaneously by a larger audience. From this perspective, Cochrane’s (177) assertion that every “audience member who sees the production as presented … accepts the final manifestation as the authored work in totality” is true, regardless of the reception by every other audience member at the same time. This example, or indeed any other ‘screened’ performance, translates as distance of a sort, but the near-simultaneity of Internet communications removes any consideration of temporal distance. As a “work of art becomes a construct with new functions” (Benjamin 107), one of its primary functions within the digital domain replaces temporal functions with display functions: influencers posting on social media, for example, are an ongoing exercise in performance that is entirely reliant on external observation or recognition for validation (Darvin). Phatic communication supersedes interpersonal connections as aggregated publics are formed based on ‘likes’: an interactive action taken to demonstrate affinity, making a quantitative metric of reach not only a source of personal validation, but also a subversion of legacy media hegemonies (Burgess the online crowd—or more appropriately, swarm—“demonstrates no internal coherence” (Han 10) as it devolves into meaningless digital noise. Even when online fan cultures are built around common purpose and shared interests (Schäfer 47), the emergence is temporary and volatile, tending to problematic behaviours and eventual dissolution (Massanari 341). The breeding grounds for so-called ‘toxic masculinity’ found in any number of subreddits stand as support for this statement: the ‘geek masculinity’ celebrated in television shows like “The Big Bang Theory” (Lorre Lanier). Similarly, while individualism fades in the face of media-led swarms, Benjamin observed the negation of aura through large-scale replication of artworks, and Ibrahim (109-11) argues that specular re-representation of self, and the associated loss of individuality, is detrimental to the value of that self’s authenticity: an argument echoed by Rojek’s (14-15) observation of how celebrity culture enforces repeated separation of self and commodity. Self-actualisation, while still possible, is far less likely in a digital communicative continuum built on shared interests as it does not serve the greater good of a prevailing common identity. Ibrahim argues that the self, by being voluntarily fragmented and represented across a plethora of digital platforms, loses authenticity in much the same way the artwork does when it is flagrantly copied (Rojek, 104-5). Baudrillard (27) echoes this, stating that as a result of our not being able to “conceive that identity has never existed and that it is merely something we play-act, we fuel this subjective illusion to the point of exhaustion ... . We wear ourselves out feeding this ghost of a representation of ourselves”. In this regard, aura is no longer something only ascribed to an artwork, but something constructed as a by-product of its apparent diminishment: only when we are in danger of losing it do we see its value (Zumthor); the same, unfortunately, can be said for identity and self-determination. The micro-celebrity’s crafted digital identity, regardless of how closely it mirrors their offline self, is a prosthetic attempt to stave off the fragmentation of those identities via polymediation: the process by which identities are fragmented via mediated representation across a plethora of platforms. Platforms that further alienate, isolate, and separate distinct characteristics of these identities for their own purposes, whether personal, political, or commodity-driven. Conclusion Aura may have initially been imparted by religious, or cult, attachments, but a secular environment demands a secular interpretation. Given the investment—if nothing else, in time—users put into their interface with digital environments, and the impact this has on individual identity formation, the inhabitants of the networked communities of the digital domain transition from an aura based in cult to one based on culture. Even if users are detached from the physical, they are in no way detached from their perception of what is authentically ‘real’ within their worldview, and the associated telesociability (Schmidt 82) of the imagined communities they inhabit simply represents an alternative value system, which must perforce be applied to the space inhabited and the media produced therein. Aura, in the context of digital celebrity, is therefore not diminished by reproduction, but transformed: where aura was once measured on the basis of the value of individual artworks and images, it is now a collective effect shaped by and measured in follower interactions. Even the apparent diminishment of individuality exacerbated by polymediation is offset by an increase in reach and attention. If the act of observation imbues an artwork with agency in an “epistemology of seeing and being seen” (Mitchell 166), then an influencer’s auratic distance must also be contingent on perception. As a result, the exhibition value underlying the perception by millions, in many cases, of fans that influencers enjoy, implies an automatic imbuing of aura upon the very content they perform, regardless of its authenticity, history, or reproduction. References Abidin, Crystal. Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online. Leeds: Emerald Publishing, 2018. 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