Emotions, society, and influencers in the digital era

1 The 21st century, a synthetic painting of the digital world

The first 24 years of this century are a time of digital devices: smartphones, tablets, and notebooks accompany daily life in both the global south and the global north. For remote and poor regions of the planet, the device of the lifeguard, social worker, or volunteer can mean the difference between life and death; at the same time, in the richest areas of the planet, these devices are the instruments of daily life.

Currently, intelligent mobile devices are an omnipresent manifestation. We spend about 3 h a day on our innovative mobile devices. Unlike other electronic devices, smartphones allow the use of these functions almost anytime and anywhere, with multiple repercussions on our daily lives. Smart mobile devices offer significant advantages, such as continuous interaction with friends, participation in engaging recreational activities, access to the Internet for an uninterrupted supply of information, and favorable implications for knowledge exchange. In contrast, using smart mobile devices can influence well-being, a trend that has emerged as a matter of considerable concern for both the audience and researchers. For example, studies have shown that using smart mobile devices affects aspects such as health and well-being, performance, and social interactions (Araujo Bacil et al. 2024).

Regarding health issues, research has identified a correlation between the use of mobile devices and the prevalence of depression and anxiety, sleep difficulties, and musculoskeletal problems in cases of excessive use of these devices. Additionally, a prevalence of empirical findings indicates a negative correlation between smartphone usage and academic performance (Amez and Baert 2020), a correlation that aligns with findings showing that excessive use of these devices is associated with decreased work productivity and engagement. Additionally, using smart mobile devices increases negative impact or stress. It reduces the quality of interactions when individuals focus on their mobile devices during social interactions, a phenomenon known as “phubbing” (Radtke et al. 2022).

In another vein, but in this practice setting, David Poveda et al. (2020) have investigated children’s interactions in terms of their appropriation of space, relationships with others in the home, and the intimate geographies of young children’s digital literacies, parental discourse to examine the selection and monitoring of digital literacies and how children interact with tablet devices and television. In this context, they propose the concept of living room assemblage as an analytical metaphor to understand the microhabitats of young children’s digital literacies and practices, which emerge as multi-layered, creative, and co-existing with other family activities.

This painting of the digital world allows us to see how the social structuration process have been increasingly transformed into interactions where sensations, emotions, and sensibilities are transformed into a key to understanding social practices and, at the same time, the object of the expansion of capitalist commodification.

The determined proliferation of capitalism globally has produced a swift, intricate, and substantial connection among the characteristics of Society 4.0, digital labour, and a political economy of morality. The current social structuration process encompasses several features, including the proliferation of Revolution 4.0 and its effects on productivity and labour, the widespread emergence of a political economy of morality founded on falsehoods, the increasing population of refugees and migrants globally, and multilateral military tensions and conflicts.

The alterations in labor and its repercussions on social structure are pivotal elements in human history: the intersection of production, needs, commodities, organizational models of labour, and systems of wealth distribution have been, are, and will continue to be fundamental components of societal formations. Similarly, one may see how technological developments have necessitated alterations in labor and social interactions overall. These technological advancements suggest modifications in how individuals perceive time, space, scarcity, and fulfillment.

In the specified context, it is evident how and why the proliferation of digital labour occurs among the widespread alterations induced by societal digitalization, resulting in implications for the politics of sensibilities.

The 4.0 Revolution, is characterized by the convergence of three primary factors: (a) the emergence of Big Data as a tool for social analysis, (b) the Gig Economy as a manifestation of increasing deinstitutionalization, and (c) the Internet of Things (IoT) as a novel paradigm of production and “management of sensibilities.”

The multiple connections between daily life, work, entertainment, and information have opened up a set of experiential situations that “overlap” spheres of living and produce kinesthetic scenarios. The everyday life of an Uber driver, a Glovo rider, an Airbnb administrator, or a politician’s community manager listens to music, talks to their relatives, plans their weekends, and works “at the same time”. The digital era and trans-globalization process is characterised by various de-linking time/space modalities, generating “digital co-presences” and “platform sensibilities”.

Being permanently connected, not differentiating between seeing another person face to face and “I saw you on the networks”, managing enjoyment in the same way that you work, redefining expectations of action and the action itself, are consequences of a life that becomes real in the digital and digital in the real.

In this scenario, influencers become a metonymic position of the new structure of work and power in trans-globalization. They become examples of what happens in the “universal.” It is these bearers of exemplary practices who, together with heroes of Netflix series, sports stars, models, and actresses in the style of the 20th century, paint the landscape of the 21st century.

Holograms, androids, robots, learning machines, and artificial intelligence are some of the new intelligence that suit human beings and other living beings on a planet under climate stress. It is necessary to understand in this horizon that the tension between artificiality, fictionality, and emotional practices is articulated through the abundance of information regarding our wishes, pleasures, and joys that humans have infused into the virtual, mobile, and digital realms. The sentient computer is an alluring reflection of our political sensibilities and a mechanism that commodifies our desires.

Secondly, due to a structural discontinuity in the material conditions of digital existence, offline circumstances are not an alternative realm but rather a contiguous domain of possibilities and disparities that invoke sentient life, encompassing its capabilities and detriments.

Thirdly, the digital realm, with its vast potential for creativity and expression, simultaneously presents a dichotomy of autonomy and dependence, influencing an individual’s identity about the role of the author or the coloniality inherent in artificial intelligence as a power mechanism.

Rather than reiterating a sterile discourse between apocalyptic and integrated perspectives, we must recognize that the sociology of digital emotions faces the challenge of reversing the previous century’s trend of life’s colonization by systems and establishing the conditions for attentive engagement to integrate intelligent systems with the utopian visions of new life worlds. However, none of this can be executed without presuming that AI is integral to forming sensations, emotions, and the politics of sensibility in the 21st century.

2 Influencers – a synthetic approach

About the influencers, there are a number of writings from different perspectives: using the affective practice of anxiety as a theoretical concept to explore the influencers (Lehto 2022), showing how #BodyPositive influencers and activists navigate anti-fat or fatphobic microaggressions in ways that impact them, their activism, and their relationships (Chen et al. 2024), about how influencers’ self-representations are made up of the same themes that together constitute the girl boss as an ideal feminine subject of the current moment (Lukan and Appleton 2024), a critical analysis of Japanese racial identity and gender in the realms of virtuality, (im)materiality, and digital consumption, focusing on a virtual influencer from Japan (Miyake 2023) or the analyses of algorithms and big data based on the figure of food influencers and the digital emotions that are crystallized there about eating (Mairano 2024) or consider Chinese social media a digital arena for internet celebrities; explore the imagery and practices of Internet celebrities, emphasizing the connection between the body, feeling, and perception about social celebrities (Scribano and Zhang 2019).

For Rizomyliotis et al. (2024), it is possible to understand how “social media serves as a means to disseminate user-generated content (UGC) or consumer-generated content (CGC) in various online formats such as videos, text, or social media fan pages” (Rizomyliotis et al. 2024: 3). Online user reviews significantly impact purchasing decisions. Influencers achieve online prominence by focusing on User-Generated Content (UGC) or Creator-Generated Content (CGC) within certain domains such as fitness, beauty, travel, fashion, and lifestyle. Leveraging their experience, skills, and attributes, they are prepared to provide pertinent information and interact with consumers interested in these topics. Social media influencers typically consist of ordinary folks who have attained online celebrity status by creating content on social media platforms and accumulating a substantial following.

Riedl et al. (2023), in their introduction to Social Media + Society, Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction, explain that Influencers are social media users who have garnered a following on a platform due to their subject matter expertise and the genuine relationships they cultivate with their audience. They grow and meticulously uphold – frequently, though not only in a professional context – credibility and authenticity through their content selection and presentation. Influencers utilize their social influence to advocate for various causes, which may encompass product endorsements for brands and companies and support for social and political principles. Influencers’ activities in advertising, specifically when they disseminate content to their audience for remuneration, have significantly transformed the sector. Influencer marketing has become a significant component of Internet advertising ecosystems wherein influencers function as “sellers, buyers, and commodities” concurrently. The tension between genuine expertise, marketing-oriented narratives, and paid work can be seen clearly in these ideas, giving us clues about what will be said in this paper later.

Along the same lines and including the place of “nano” or “micro-influencers,” Arnesson (2023) has reconstructed the relationship between influencers’ authenticity and “strategic behaviour” and their political impact.

Recently, Heeris Christensen et al. (2024), have certainly presented how Influencer is the result of a process of self-exploitation linked to emotional work that involves its practice:

We suggest a new mode of emotional labor in which transmutation happens in practices where influencers display their private actions to the public transfer commercial agendas into their private realm and exploit their selves. Consequently, digital influencers work under the condition that they must self-exploit to succeed, and we demonstrate how they do this in seven distinct work practices. While we suggest self-exploitation to be a condition of digital influencers’ work, we question whether this is a boundary condition in the transformation to become more powerful person-brands where work becomes more individualized and subjectified (Heeris Christensen et al. 2024: 571).

One aspect of influencers’ work is that which emerges from the intersection with everyday life and dispositions to influence before the pandemic, in a very systematic way, provided a characterization of “family” influencers. Crystal Abidin's (2017) article exposes how, as mommy bloggers, global microcelebrities, and reality TV families trajectory their paths; family influencers on social media platforms emerge as a new genre of microcelebrities. Family influencers are distinguished by the “anchor” content they generate, in which they manifest their creative skills, such as the creation of versions of songs or humorous sketches, which are initiatives with a high economic return. However, this trade is based on an intrinsic stream of “filler” content, in which daily routines of domestic life are shared with followers as a manifestation of “calibrated amateurism”.

The Influencer is a counselor; and a mediator establishes a routine of recommendations of what, how, and when to perform an action understood as acceptable and acceptable. It gives north, indicates east, points the way to obtain successful results and public consideration, and is a bridge between products, processes, and goals that unite the desires, passions, and enjoyment of producers/consumers/producers. It is a practice of saying that makes the actor more attractive, that makes the situation a seductive action and narrates the success of preparing and putting oneself in a plot of seduction for action.

Some influencers are human beings and influencers who are virtual results of the same virtual/mobile/digital world. Digital influencers are non-human “intelligent” individuals generated using artificial intelligence, 3D animation, and motion capture using graphic software, often in augmented reality scenarios. They are assigned a personality and even a narrative.

Virtual influencers are gaining ground in digital influencer marketing, an industry that in 2023 reached a record figure of $21.1 billion worldwide. These influencers are trendy among young people of Generation Z, so brands and advertisers do not hesitate to use them for their social media campaigns.

According to the study by SocialPubli (2023): “62 % of Marketing specialists would agree to work with a virtual influencer generated by AI. This is quite surprising, and we can already affirm it when checking some existing collaborations with previously mentioned virtual influencers. However, 38 % of companies still prefer to work with real influencers who bring humanity and emotions to their promotions.” (SocialPubli 2023).

Some names of reputable virtual influencers are:

Lu do Magalu – @magazineluiza. This Influencer, with 6.6 million followers, was created by the Brazilian store Magazine Luiza. Share content mainly from your digital commerce.

Casas Bahia CB – @casasbahia. With 3.7 million followers, he is originally from Brazil and created as the mascot of the Casa Bahia retail brand. Publish content about games, pop culture, sustainability and Brazilian identity.

Lil Miquela – @lilmiquela. With 2.7 million followers, it was created by Los Angeles startup Brud. She is a model and singer. Generate lifestyle content.

Noonoouri – @noonoouri. With 424,000 followers, this Influencer was created in Germany and collaborated with renowned brands such as Dior. Its content is mainly about fashion.

But – @imma.gram. With 395,000 followers, this Influencer was created in Japan. Share content related to Japanese fashion and culture.

Shudu – @shudu.gram. With 241,000 followers, she is a virtual model created by Cameron-James Wilson. She spreads fashion and aesthetic content.

Bermuda – @bermudaisbae. With 236,000 followers, this Influencer from Los Angeles created in 2016 is known for generating controversies and shaking up the virtual environment.

Aytana Lopez – @fit_aitana. It was created by a Barcelona-based agency and has 225,000 followers. Its content is based on lifestyle, gaming, and fitness.

Blawko – @blawko22. This Influencer, created by the company Brud, has 127,000 followers. He is part of the new wave of virtual lifestyle influencers.

Maria – @soymar.ia. With 83,500 followers, she is the first Mexican virtual Influencer. She also uploads lifestyle content and other protest topics, such as gender equality.

From this perspective, influencing is working, and working implies practices of feeling dedicated to creating politics of sensibilities within the horizons of specific forms of emotional ecologies. Influencers are a form of digital work. Digital work, platform sensibility, and knowing by touching are basic components of the world of digital life that directly impact the configuration of what we call Influencers.

In terms of influencers’ practices as digital work, it is possible to recognize that Influencers are subject to the logic of precariousness, a set of emotional investments and bodily speech acts, and a disengagement from time/space.

The life of Influencers depends on the views and visits to their productions, on the likes and marketing plans of the sponsors, on careful planning of the management of their social networks, and the changes in the “mood” of the followers; all these aspects of the precariousness of their employment situation. Like the rider and the Uber driver, the Influencer depends on demand, his ability to manage accumulation and expenses, and the flow of events that do not rely entirely on him. Nothing is stable, fixed, or determined; your life is a flow of events and an emotional management of moments. In this same vein, the Influencer’s task consists of producing emotional investments (sensu Melucci); he must develop practices of feeling as an essential commodity of his business that is nourished by his own emotions, having to design bodily speech acts that “show” said “emotional bet”. Gestures, looks, postures, clothing, and nudity make a body for the camera of the devices as that which advices has become a body and is part of the exhibition of a particular emotional ecology. There is a body hexis of Influencer (sensu Bourdieu); it is a practice of feeling that is “incorporated” and is a sensitive message that carries the emotions inscribed in those bodies as the Influencer’s message. What the influencer “makes you feel” is the key to the product that is influenced, suggested, and sold. The Influencer uses and produces the experience of unlinking time and space that digitality allows; he works all day but in spaces and hours unlinked from “modern” work management in the sense of Henrie Lefevbre; he is a creator of social network rhythms that sell experiences. Breaking the linearity of seeking resources, producing, and selling by decoupling time and space is a “skill” of the Influencer.

As soon as their inscription in the platform sensibility, Influencers produce the commodification of the experience, enhance the regime of instantaneity, and reproduce the regime of immediate enjoyment.

The “sale” of moments is the offer of experiences that are for everyone but are experienced as individuals; having an experience here is the Influencer’s offer. Living, experiencing, and going through a situation is what Influencers offer, producing controlled environments of successful experiences. Their recipes are assured in a world where everything is uncertain (by definition). It is not about eating but rather living a moment of putting a sensation in your mouth producing something “special”. The work of influencers elevates the instantaneous to the maximum as the key to a politics of sensibility where the instantaneous is the key to living. I don’t know what I want, but I want it. It’s the motto of all influencer sales, whether proposing a pseudo form of Buddhism, a far-fetched way to increase adrenaline with danger, or waiting for homemade bread. In the recipe, you see it is instant. Like a soup made of powder and hot water, the “handy experiences” influencers do not propose are made effective by simply repeating what the packaging says. The instantaneous is the existential of capitalist mutations since the middle of the last century; it is an action by which the time between starting, producing, and finishing an action is reduced. It is a doing that makes the coincidence of the here/now and is a result obtained acceleratedly. In this context, there is a realization of the experience of organizing life in and through immediate enjoyment. It is a practice that connects pleasure and displeasure without mediations, detours, and distractions; it repeats the formula of what is pleasurable without stopping, without mediations, without “bridges”, without anything in between. It is the “without-waiting” formula. It is the taking/appropriation of the fruit (enjoyment) and directly extracting the results.

Influencers are a fundamental part of learning by touching, clicking, and swiping the device screen, giving voice commands, listening to podcasts, and watching videos. These are practices of the billions of subjects who follow influencers and that they promote. One of the most apparent influences of market advisors is to be mediators for the unnoticed “incorporation” of the virtual/mobile/digital world as a space made by touching, where our hands not only manufacture but create, know, and reproduce a set of individual worlds. The Influencer produces photos, scenarios, and paintings of the world that “represent” cognitive/affective maps that we use on and from our devices and that we users host and manage from our ability to create by touching.

3 Openings and motivations from the articles gathered in this special issue

As we have already said here, we summarize some of the central ideas of the works compiled in this special issue in the authors’ own words, ending with the schematization of some possible emotional ecologies that emerge from them. The articles come from different geopolitics and geocultures, which allows us to take them as “witnesses” of an increasingly trans-globalization situation and as a guide to see the proximities and distances of the emotional regulations effectively carried out in the world.

The Somdatta Mukherjee paper Influencing Eating Choices, Manipulating Emotions, & The Influencer: An Ethnography shows us how our eating choices depend on our economic condition, the availability of the raw materials and the food we wish to consume, etc., and points out that now that choice is manipulated by influencers on social media, and the food-related content on social media influences our thought process regarding food intake. The work underlines how viewers and consumers are vulnerable to emotional risk. Food influencers alter our emotional states through their social media engagements, and YouTube documentation helps in the process of cultural diffusion and the preservation of culture.

Maria Victoria Mairano's work titled Emotions of food influencers regarding digital work and the transmission of food knowledge on Instagram aims to problematize influencers’ emotional ecologies regarding their digital work as content generators, along with the emotional ecologies recorded in the food practices influencers share on their profiles; this article addresses the criteria that organize the structuration regime of sensibilities on Instagram regarding food practices and the generation of content based on the figures of Argentinian food influencers.

In their article, What Makes a Super Influencer? Testing the Origin of Fame Theory in China, Yihan Shao & Lars Willnat present how social media influencers in China have significantly impacted shaping public political and social attitudes and behaviors. This study, grounded in the origin of fame theory, examines which type of influencers – originals, celebrities, or journalists – are most effective in driving changes in their followers’ attitudes and behaviours.

In another vein in their paper “How come I don’t look like that”: The Negative Impact of Wishful Identification with Influencers on Follower Well-being, Ruonan Zhang, Yu Chen, Chang Bi, and Mercado Trinidee argue that with influencers being increasingly popular on social media, their impact on followers extends beyond providing entertainment, accompaniment, and product recommendation, and discussed how the parasocial relationship with the influencer was found to be a significant moderator between wishful identification and follower well-being-

In the article Mexican queer influencers: corporeal-emotional social reconfigurations , Melina Amao Ceniceros shows how the proliferation of queer influencers is framed in various phenomena that connect celebrity culture, digital psychopolitics, and historical LGBTIQ+ movements, resulting in what she proposes to call a post-reality. The study analyzes the tensions of bodies/emotions that arise from the visibility of queer influencers in Mexico in terms of representation and subjectivization of the sex/gender system, comparing visual narratives and political positionings or the lack of these in a necropolitical context for the LGBTIQ+ community.

Juan Liu and Jung-Sook Lee, in their study Social Media Influencers and Followers’ Loneliness: The Mediating Roles of Parasocial Relationship, Sense of Belonging, and Social Support maintain that prior research examines how social media use, in general, affects experiences of loneliness. Few studies have investigated the specific effects of interaction with social media influencers on loneliness and well-being. The study examines how followers’ interaction with social media influencers affects loneliness through mediation mechanisms underlying this process and shows how the results suggested that interaction with influencers was positively associated with loneliness through parasocial relationships and perceived social support.

In the article Content creators as social influencers: Predicting online video posting behaviours, Leo Jeffres, David Atkin, and Kimberly Neuendorf from a quantitative vein, describe how creative content influencers are increasingly seizing the opportunity not only to express themselves but also to monetize their videos and become entrepreneurs. The study tests an integrative framework to determine whether the “creative influencers environment” impacts the degree of motivation for posting different types of videos online, alongside the gratifications derived from such activity.

From these diverse contribution, it is possible to see how two emotional ecologies are formed that are very important to understand the media and influencers’ connection: (a) desire, gratification, risk, and (b) fame, loneliness, and success.

Emotions are contagious, copied, simulated, and experienced in the mobile/virtual/digital world as they are in the real world. Now, these articles and what we have been analyzing here allow us to open another series of questions: How will the immersive future of media and everyday life influence people? With whom will they follow/share this “new” reality? Are there social sciences with the instruments and theories to analyze them?