Crystal Abidin on Influencers

A new people has emerged in the digital age, that of ‘internet famous’ celebrities. And that new people has a class of social scientist focused on studying them, the digital anthropologist. Crystal Abidin, a professor at Australia’s Curtin University and founding director of the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab there, is such as digital anthropologist. Her research covers influencers – both adult and child and the general pop culture centered on social media, especially in the Asia Pacific region.

In this Social Science Bites podcast, Abidin offers interviewer David Edmonds a metaphor to understand how her cyber-ethnography and digital anthropology work in practice. “I often think of anthropologists as Mars rovers that you throw into these unknown planets, and slowly but surely, we roll around the planet looking for bits of data, bits of material that might be new or novel. We're not going for quantity and volume at this scale. We're looking for what's neglected, unseen, sidelined by the margins, not yet mainstream. And we're measuring how much of these things are characteristic of the planet and worthy of study. … [A]s an anthropologist, given that my fidelity is to people and their cultures, I don't always only go for the shiniest, most mainstream thing. I often look for what's left behind.”

In this conversation, though, Abidin talks about something very shiny indeed – those professional internet celebrities known collectively as “influencers.” She explains how while the top influencers do generate the paydays seen in popular media, the ecosystem extends down to individuals who are spending their own money in hopes of someday making it big. She also draws a distinction between influencers and creators, and also between influencers and memes. 

Abidin also dives into regional differences in influencer culture, using her own detailed analysis of Asia Pacific influencer cultures, to explore regional differences that should be understood when assessing content on global platforms. “[I]f we were to discount the hegemony of American popular culture and their stronghold and a lot of social media, the palette is so diverse, the markets are so varied, that trends go in many different directions. So we need to sometimes think about who we are speaking about, what the superpower of the day is, and whenever we make these generalizations, what are the limitations? Who's not included in them?”

In addition to her role at Curtin, Abidin founded the TikTok Cultures Research Network and is an affiliate researcher with the Media Management and Transformation Centre at Jönköping University. She was named an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow for 2019 to 2024. Currently the editor-in-chief of Media International Australia, she has written or edited a number of books that bridge popular concerns with academic rigor, including 2018’s Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online and this year’s Influencer Marketing: Interdisciplinary and Socio-Cultural Perspectives (co-edited with Lauren Gurrieri and Jenna Drenten),