Once they recognize that the reason that audiences were flocking to these creators is because of their seemingly authentic nature, then that became the thing that they had to commodify and they had to keep the pipe of authenticity flowing so that they could continue to build this business and everyone could continue to make money.

Yeah. could continue to make money. Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Emily Hund.

Emily is the author of The Influencer Industry, The Quest for Authenticity on Social Media.

She's also a research affiliate at the Center on Digital Culture and Society

at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication.

Now, obviously, we are all familiar with how common influencers

and creators have become in our lives, in the media, all these sorts of things, right? Whether

they're on TikTok or YouTube or Twitter or, you know, wherever else they happen to be these days,

you might even be able to count me in that category, as we talk about in this conversation.

But the influencer industry has become this huge thing as all these people online who do this for a

living or who don't do it for a living but maybe hope to have developed these followings and

advertisers and kind of branding agencies and all this have followed along with it. We know that this is

part of the business model of this industry. And so I was interested in talking to Emily to find

out how this actually came to be, right? This didn't just kind of spring up out of nowhere.

Obviously, we've had celebrities and artists for a long time, but this kind of influencer industry

is a specific kind of creation of

the internet and of a variety of kind of forces that have emerged from that. And so in this

conversation, we talk about the blogging era and how that kind of merges into the social media

era and how kind of the 2008 recession is a really key moment where you not only have like a lot

of people who are kind of thrown out of their jobs, who are working in media industries anyway,

who are trying to figure out like, okay, what am I going to do next? How am I going to make some

...