Feelings on display and for sale: the affective economy of bloggers

By the early 2020s, the phenomenon of blogging not about anything in particular, but "about life and feelings" in general, had taken shape as a special kind of economic activity. In the 2010s, people joked about, say, Paris Hilton: "She's famous for being famous," and everyone understood the comicality of the phenomenon. In the current decade, a lot of people genuinely do not understand this humor.

Now the mere fact that a certain person is known by the mass of Internet users creates him a liquid social and economic capital. And in order to become a "microcelebrity," it is not necessary to have any profession, not even required to be a pop star.

People who have a conventional appearance (the statistical majority likes the image) and are able to produce emotions in the frame, whether positive or negative, sincere or not, stand a good chance of obtaining this status.

The activity of bloggers of this kind is referred to as "affective labor. Initially, this category included advertising production, a large part of mass culture genres, the caring industry, and women's domestic work. A characteristic feature of the affective economy is its focus on changing people's emotional states. Scholars today believe that bloggers are also part of it, because they do the same thing.

Curiously enough, pop stars used to have to be able to do something (sing, act in movies, etc.) in order to acquire social capital, and second, they had to keep their distance from their audiences - to be inaccessible or limited in their ability to communicate.

And now the conditions for success have changed dramatically: you don't need to be able to do anything, you don't need to cultivate an image of a celestial, but instead you should be as involved as possible in communicating with your followers.

Microcelebrities are not required to have traditional virtues: they don't have to be one hundred percent beautiful, smart, competent in any field, friendly, or at least rational. What is required of them is affective behavior. And they are not forbidden to be obscurantist, dreary or aggressive.

The main tasks of Internet celebrities are as follows:

• look more or less good-looking;
• show plenty of emotion in the frame (or text, which is rapidly becoming a rarity);
• regularly deliver new content to the audience;
• engage in two-way communication with the audience.

Bloggers are still disdained by representatives of traditional institutions of affective labor, and this is understandable - they had to prove their own competence in an entertainment or socially significant profession to begin with.

However, Internet platforms took microcelebrities so seriously that they promptly created mechanisms for monetizing content to accommodate the growth of their audiences. After all, non-platform online businesses willingly went for advertising integrations in the most visited blogger channels.

The bloggers themselves sell merch, collect donations, publish CPA links, and the most successful of them take subscribers from the platforms to their own sites and even try on whether to order OEM factories for batches of physical goods that can be sold under their personal brand name.

In just a few years, bloggers have found many ways to monetize content "about feelings, about life, about me." And their earnings, for example, in Russia have already exceeded those of newspapers and magazines. In 2020, domestic bloggers legally earned 11 billion rubles on YouTube and Instagram alone. If we take into account "gray" sales, the amount could be twice as much.

And this whole economy grew out of webcam, but not the one everyone thinks of

According to Ekaterina Kolpinets, lecturer and graduate student at the Higher School of Economics, in her review "The Significance of Affective Labor in Internet Selebrity Culture," the history of the phenomenon goes back to the first generation of girls who invented webcam blogging around the end of 1999.

Unlike models who offered a private broadcast starring themselves to just one paying customer, these bloggers distributed the images from the webcams set up in their homes to anyone who wanted them via the then social networks (mostly LiveJournal).

It grew partly out of the American female samizdat movement, brought to life back in the '80s by young ambitious girls' discontent with the fact that men dominated even the indie scene at the time - in music, fashion and so on. And some of the first webcam bloggers were motivated by the possibility of gaining mass popularity without much effort.

Their age in those years ranged from 20 to 30, the majority did not last even three years "on the air", although some pioneers of video blogging still keep in touch with their audiences, but already in the form of posts on social networks.

For more on the history of webcam as a home reality show, see digital ethnographer Teresa Senft's book Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks (2008).

Getting gossip from the heroes of gossip themselves

In studying today's "about me and my feelings" bloggers, scientists at first assumed that audience interest in them was driven by the positive emotions that homemade content brings and the authenticity of what happens to bloggers in the footage. However, science quickly abandoned such a naïve viewpoint.

Academic terms such as calibrated amateurism, calculated authenticity, curated imperfection, and aspirational ordinariness are now commonplace in the specialist literature. What does this say? Alas, it suggests that bloggers' "authenticity" is not authentic.

And the positive vibe was not very good either. In fact, it turns out that broadcasting negative affect is great for attracting viewers, increasing the number of subscribers and strengthening the fan base.

For example, "disturbing and tearful" blogs have considerable popularity. And at this point, science believes that two things are responsible for this phenomenon:

• the normalization of personalization - the acceptance by the masses at large as an approved social behavior of publicly broadcasting one's own life, including one's intimate life;
• the growing popularity of "mood economics," in which (quote) "...legitimacy and self-value are acquired not through traditional currencies such as work, marriage, or class solidarity, but through the ability to organize one's emotions into a narrative of self-transformation.

Simply put, audiences are willing to watch with interest how bloggers "just live" and change as individuals (in fact, as characters) from day to day over time.

Today's Internet users, consuming the content of video bloggers and streamers, seem to get juicy gossip from the very first hand - from the heroes of the gossip themselves. Not only that, the bloggers' experiences do not have to be true, their lives in the frame - authentic, and the content - positively colored.

Audiences can repeatedly and publicly accuse bloggers of hypocrisy, outright deception, hype on misfortune, illness and even the death of their loved ones, but they still do not stop consuming blogger content.

Subscribers to popular Internet characters often and justifiably suspect that microcelebrities carefully construct their "spontaneity" and that all the authenticity of what happens in the frame is staged - exactly like on TV.

There is all kinds of hell going on in the bloggers' comments, and there are throngs of followers, but magically all this movement only increases the social capital of the new web stars.

The author of this article does not want to give examples of, to put it mildly, ambivalent behavior of Russian microselebrities, and refers those who want them to the already mentioned research paper by Ekaterina Kolpinets: there are enough trashy stories in her text (up to the description of a viral stream with an attempt to self-pilot). Here we are examining the phenomenon itself, not the specifics, and we even want to find some positive aspects of it.

They are few, but they are there. For example, in the overall mass of "blogs about feelings" there are socially significant blogs that talk about the life and adaptation in society of people with disabilities, mental disorders, people who have experienced domestic or criminal violence, people who have been subjected to discrimination on one or another grounds, etc.

The content of such blogs helps to reduce the unfair stigmatization of the "wrong," "freaks," and "psychos" and gradually works to humanize society.

Another positive quality of the "affective economy" of blogging is that it has given people with a creative streak, producing their own product rather than "just living" in a frame, new ways to make a living.

Some formats of contemporary affective blogging are used by professionals in a wide range of humanities fields - from psychotherapists to musicians, from designers to handmade craftsmen - and are gaining an engaged audience through them.

Although record-breaking hundreds of thousands of subscribers and millions of views, as a rule, non-professionals have nothing but dubious homegrown acting.

Where will the "affective economy" of bloggers go in the future?

The author finds it appropriate to quote here the opinion on this topic of Alexei Krol, a provocative, mystically inclined but pragmatic blogger-entrepreneur. He is an experienced, coming-of-age Russian-speaking author who lives in the United States and has successfully monetized his own pen.

Specifically, Krol predicts:

• Bloggers will start making money from infoproducts. Everyone will start launching their own, designed for the existing loyal audience. The motivation of the audience to buy is to get closer to the social results of the Influencer.
• Popular microselebrities will try to drag audiences from platforms to personal sites as they grow, so they don't have to depend on the often hostile telos of Internet giants. It is likely that these sites will be private social networks, closed and paid for - like clubs.
• Bloggers will begin to create private labels - private label goods made for them in China, Pakistan, Turkey, etc. But they will not sell them on marketplaces, but on their own marketplaces.
• Over time, bloggers will begin to turn these platforms... into marketplaces, but they will provide showcases for only selected brands for a sales commission of 10-30%.

Krol's visionaryism seems sound, supported in some respects by the observations of scholars and the experiences of those involved in the blogging "affective economy.

Today, we must face the fact that from the homegrown women's reality shows of the early 2000s an entire new industry has grown in just two decades-an ambiguous, ambivalent, ethically questionable, but heavily loaded with money.

As it turns out, broadcasting any emotion to a large audience is a lucrative business that has become almost a profession, despite the fact that it does not require the ability to do anything of value to society...