Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media

You are invited to register for our upcoming two-day symposium, Darkness to hyper-visibility: exploring promotional and creator cultures of social media taking place on 13 to 14 November 2025. As part of the program, attendees are also warmly invited to a public lecture by Dr Kelley Cotter, supported by the Tom O'Regan Fellowship and the School of Communication and Arts, on 13 November at 4:00 PM.

For those wishing to attend the public lecture and not the symposium, a separate registration will be available soon.

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.

About the Public Lecture

Platform Epistemology: Shaping Algorithmic Knowledge in the Visibility Game

Understanding of platform algorithms is central to the creative and strategic work of achieving and sustaining an audience online, as they determine who and what becomes visible in feeds. Platforms have long been criticized for concealing details about their algorithms in ways that limit creators’ agency. This talk extends those critiques by introducing the concept of platform epistemology, an additional vector of platform power shaping creativity, labour conditions, and inequity within promotional cultures. Kelly will illustrate platform epistemology through a case study of Instagram influencers, demonstrating platforms’ control over the epistemic resources shaping the practices by which influencers construct and legitimate knowledge about algorithms. Influencers learn about algorithms via observation, experimentation, desk research, social connections—particularly with platform employees—and training from self-proclaimed algorithm experts. Throughout these learning processes, Instagram, as both an infrastructure and commercial entity, shapes the availability, distribution, and perceived legitimacy of information, influencing how the community constructs and values knowledge about its algorithms. Here, the “visibility game” structures not only pursuits of visibility but also the community of practice through which influencers come to know algorithms. Platform design and disclosure decisions thus do more than constrain and enable creators’ strategies; they actively shape the production and distribution of knowledge about how visibility works.

About Kelley Cotter

Kelley Cotter is an Assistant Professor at Penn State University whose research explores how data-centric technologies (especially algorithms) shape social, cultural, and political life. Her research examines how everyday users understand and interact with algorithmic systems, and how these insights can inform more equitable forms of platform governance.

Program

Download the full program here

Thursday 13 November

Friday 14 November