Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media
About the symposium
Social media is now a central space for promotional activity, not just by advertisers and brands, but also creators, influencers, public figures, and everyday users. These platforms operate on systems of visibility and algorithmic recommendation, requiring all users to engage in promotional practices to be seen, heard, and valued. In doing so, they blur the boundaries between public and private life, branding and authenticity, visibility and obscurity.
This two-day symposium explores the visibility games at the heart of social media’s promotional and creator cultures. From influencers and everyday users to advertisers and automated algorithms, everyone on digital platforms is caught in the dynamics of being seen, being hidden, or being unknowingly profiled. What does it mean to be hyper-visible? What does it mean to stay in the algorithmic dark?
We invite researchers to examine the spectrum of visibility in social media: the politics of who and what gets seen; the cultural and technical systems that shape promotion; and the strategies users develop to navigate these infrastructures.
This symposium will explore how branding, identity, algorithmic culture, advertising, and online self-presentation intersect in the digital attention economy, and how these intersections shape questions of visibility, power, and social justice.
Call for papers
The playful, participatory and creative cultures of digital and social media platforms are fundamental to their commercial business models. The more users translate their lives into content and data the more fine-tuned platforms’ algorithmic models and attention economies become.
While advertisers and brands are key content creators on platforms, all content creators - ordinary people, influencers, professionals, politicians and so on - need to act like brands to generate attention within the algorithmically-driven recommendation engines that organize flows of attention.
These entanglements between everyday life, creator cultures, advertisers and algorithmic models are a ‘visibility game’ (Cotter 2019). In the promotional and creator cultures of social media practices of visibility and darkness can be understood as intersecting, as well as playing out across a range or ‘spectrum of visibility’.
In this one day symposium we are interested in work from researchers that explores these dynamics of visibility from ‘darkness’ to ‘light’, from hidden to hyper-visible, in the promotional and creator cultures of social media.
At one end of this spectrum of visibility, increasingly algorithmically targeted and ‘tuned’ promotional cultures make users more visible than ever to automated models (Brown et al. 2024). Social media platforms are tuned to make particular identities, bodies, styles, feelings, values and ways of life hyper-visible. Automated models make decisions about what content is visible in an individual's social media feeds. Digital tools like augmented reality filters tune various kinds of content toward preferred cultural norms and values that can be understood as ‘boosting’ visibility.
At the same time, the promotional cultures of social media are also dark. Where once advertising was a relatively public form it now flows in individual social media feeds, away from broader public view and appreciation. The algorithmic models that associate us with each other use proxies for our identities, interests and feelings that are unknown to us (Phan and Wark 2021). In doing so, they distribute visibility unevenly, reproducing social structures relating to race, class, gender, and sexuality.
Along these spectrums of visibility, creators develop practices for gaining and managing visibility - who, where and how they want to be seen or unseen. Creators and users develop algorithmic imaginaries and conspiritualities to speculate about, navigate and make sense of infrastructures and relationships of visibility they are caught in. Critical work on social media has investigated the complex dynamics as wokeness becomes ‘hyper-visible’ in social media’s promotional cultures, at the same time they are readily appropriated by harmful industries, scammers, hustlers and disinformation operations. In all of this, there is a “knottiness” between “social media’s support of visibility as a primary means of doing politics, and visibility as highly entangled with judgements around authenticity and sincerity” (Sobande et al. 2022).
We want to ask what it might mean to think about spectrums of visibility in digital and social media promotional cultures in ways that take up questions about justice, marginalization and equity. What kinds of practices and promotional phenomena might fall on this spectrum? How might we better understand the politics of visibility and darkness in the promotional cultures of social media? What can we learn by bringing together those studying data-driven promotional cultures and techniques with those studying subjectification processes in relation to digital cultures?
We invite abstracts of 100-200 words for papers that address these spectrums of visibilities and their politics. Topics might include:
- The intersections between promotional, creator and influencer cultures
- Brand cultures and politics
- The algorithmic and computational nature of digital advertising
- Emerging promotional models, formats, techniques
- The politics of visibility and darkness on social media
- Creator identities and practices of visibility and invisibility
- Algorithmic gaming and visibility spectrums in promotional cultures
Call for Papers have now closed.