Bobae Bak | 2022-2023 HIVE Intern Showcase

Project: How platforms see influencers
Intern: Bobae Bak
Supervisors: Prof Crystal Abidin (School of Media, Creative Arts and Social Inquiry), Carley Tillett (Curtin HIVE)
Scholarship funded by: Curtin HIVE and Curtin University Faculty of Humanities
Abstract: Video social media platforms have grown rapidly popular, and even become essential for communication and connection in modern society. Alongside these, various genres of Influencers have emerged across content streams and formats, generating a range of socio-cultural impacts on society. But what comes to mind when you think about ‘Influencers’? Depending on our media consumption and personal preferences, all of us have different impressions of who a 'typical' Influencer is and what they might look like. Likewise, platforms also adopt algorithmic sorting and ranking mechanisms to group together and promote Influencer contents to viewers. In this project, we study the visual benchmarking of facial optics in 9 popular short video, long video, and livestream video platforms from Silicon Valley and the East Asian region: AfreecaTV, Bigo, Bilibili, Instagram, Kakao, TikTok, Twitch, Xiaohongshu, and YouTube. Using a combination of qualitative ethnographic and quantitative computational approaches, we use empirical data to generate original composites of 27 virtual human faces that reveal the dominant visual norms of the 'average' Influencer in specific genres across the platforms. Situated against the socio-political contexts of each platform, these 'Influencer faces' provide insight into the preferences and promotional practices of platforms in curating Influencer content to audiences.