The Selfie Generation by Alicia Eler

Author:Alicia Eler
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: eBook ISBN: 9781510722668
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2017-04-05T04:00:00+00:00

We expect that the Kardashians endorsing something like Fit-Tea detox tea on their social media is clearly for promotional purposes—as social media celebrities, we expect that they’re getting paid to sponsor products because they’ve made themselves into celebrities through reality TV and social media.5 The regular person who is endorsing products on social media is, ultimately, emulating the Kardashians’ mode of doing exactly the same thing.

Kendall Jenner took that one step further by co-opting activism that spreads through social media. (As we know from chapter 2, that’s not how actual activism works. But in the Kardashians’ social media advertising landscape, that doesn’t matter.) In the ad, Jenner attempts to market herself as an “activist” by having an “authentic” experience—except she is only doing so for commercial gains.

Jenner appears as a protestor in a Pepsi ad, featuring other protestors clashing with police. In the ad, she hands a Pepsi to a police officer, who takes a sip and then stands down. A woman in a hijab photographs her, and the crowd cheers as suddenly everything is wonderful! Wait, what?! Apparently with a Pepsi in hand, the cops realize that actually, it’s all good. Obviously, this would never happen to anyone who is actively participating in a protest, and is actually insulting to people who are working for social justice.

People spoke up on social media and elsewhere, like this especially poignant tweet from Bernice King, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr’s daughter:

“If only Daddy would have known the power of #Pepsi.”6 Pepsi apologized and removed the ad.

The Kardashians are one thing, but when actual friends who don’t appear to be micro-influencers and are in peoples’ social networks start promoting a product or service, the line between social media “authenticity” and straight-up marketing gets hazy. Regardless, it’s important to remember that the selfie, no matter what the purpose of it, is always an advertisement for whomever or whatever is pictured in the image, whether that’s just a person in a bathroom or a person discussing a product or service. The selfie tows the line between vulnerability and publicity, capitalizing on the space in between. Thanks to social media, marketing to individuals on a hyperpersonalized level has become accessible, easy, and seemingly carefree. And always, the product is you.

Aside from the selfie as advertisement, after the selfie trend tipped in 2013, companies began using the selfie in campaigns as a way to #connect with millennial consumers. Or whatever. In order to do so, the company using the selfie has to buck the popular notion of selfies as narcissistic, and of millennials as the trash generation, lazy, addicted to their phones. Instead, in this context the selfie must just be seen as a way to #connect and be social, sharing with a niche “community”—aka, target audience, not actual community—over a product or consumer interest. This is a way to make people feel something about a product, or create a sense of intimacy between consumer and consumed, and to tell people that selfie-ing is a normalized and

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