Aura, Identity, and Celebrities in the Digital Age

Introduction As technologies and their dependent media evolve, so too does fan culture. Throughout recent history, fan cultures mobilise behind common causes, as evidenced by the 1893 ‘death’ of Sherlock Holmes and the resounding backlash from black armband-wearing fans begging for his resurrection (Culpepper) on the printed page. The screaming masses of Beatlemania drowning out the band themselves during their performances in the 1960s (Cardany) saw fan culture manifesting at performance sites, driven by television and radio campaigning. This was soon followed by the fan outcry of 1967-68, the so-called ‘first fan campaign’ protesting the possible cancellation of Star Trek after only two seasons (Loehr et al. 307). And following that, the advent of the Star Wars phenomenon, the birth of Comic-Con, the rise of participatory cultures … all prime examples among many of fan culture, technology, and media existing in symbiosis. Now, we are faced with the emerging metaverse and the immediacy (not to mention anonymity) of digital fan cultures, coupled with the influencer phenomenon. This article, rather than presenting a chronology of fan culture and technology’s relationship, will focus on micro-celebrity (Senft 346) and its associated reliance on fan culture. The phenomenon will be interrogated through the lens of auratic perception: an admittedly contentious metric, but one that can be conflated with content, performance and identity as easily as Benjamin originally applied the concept to the arenas of art, technology, and politics in the 1920s. A close reading of relevant scholarship is employed to investigate and ask: can micro-celebrity fan culture be validated in terms of auratic perception, and can a corresponding diminishment in aura be observed in the fragmentation of identity experienced by the auto-exploitative digital identity performances content creators engage in? Micro-Celebrities First, the chief players in this conceptual space must be defined. The contemporary call to commodification is heard nowhere as loudly as in the voice of the influencer. The micro-celebrities of the digital age differ from traditional concepts of celebrity in that they occupy “a state of being famous to a niche group of people, [that] is also a behavior: the presentation of oneself as a celebrity regardless of who is paying attention” (Marwick 114). The influencer conflates popularity and attention—measured through analytic metrics such as likes, shares, and comments—with commercial success and, through affiliate programmes, attempts to portray lives of aspirational success to their fans and followers (Abidin 72; 79-80). Mass media may not make these content creators, whose personal selves and commodified selves co-exist in a strange synergy, into household names, but their reach often outstrips even that of the ‘traditional’ celebrities of legacy media. Although the dichotomy of creative expression presented by these audience-turned-consumer identities, where the democratic potentiality of a “persistent address to viewer inherently invites feedback” (Burgess & Green 84) is at odds with the superficial vulgarity of the banal activities they consistently share with a rapt audience, the influencer is more than just an aspirational, commodified figure. In a world where digital users find the parasocial bonds formed with these influencers more credible than those formed with other thought leaders (Barta et al.), from artists to scientists to politicians, we increasingly find that “individuals often adopt new social behaviours when they are strongly influenced by repeated signals” (Feng et al.), thereby rendering influencers the new vanguard of a socially conditioned cult founded on the “near-religious presence ascribed to celebrities and celebrity culture” (Rojek 49). To establish these cultures and followings, the influencer enacts (or performs) a personal brand alongside their ‘real’ identity. The auto-exploitative actions taken in pursuit of validation and attention represent a corresponding decay of the corporeal, substituting physical presence with a digital prosthesis as individualism fades away in the face of a mimetic logic dictating its price as “the loss of freedom and individuality” (Kattago 69-70). Individuality implies distance: a recognition of a sense of self separate from others. And that distance is contingent on perception and can manifest as physical, psychological or even temporal—effectively aligning with the concept of aura. Aura As such, the second area of investigation must be Walter Benjamin’s (104-5) aura, that “strange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance, however near” experienced by a viewer upon perceiving an artwork. As a definition, it lacks operational depth, as distance itself becomes an abstract within the context of perception. Even Gestalt theory requires that any distance observed be analysed in terms of the mode of presentation, or context, namely “the apparent size of the object, the number of objects interposed between it and us, the disparity of retinal images, the degree of adjustment and convergence” (Merleau-Ponty 54), rather than in terms of the object itself. And even if modes and typologies of distance are defined, no metric exists to measure how much—or how little—distance must be enforced before auratic perception occurs. Sensation may be a basic unit of measuring experience, but how is a sensation of distance delineated in repeatable terms? Consequently, aura as a product of distance cannot be observed itself as an essential phenomenon; identifying multiple informants at work within the separation of image, observer, and site of reception—tradition, context, and time—all imply distance without the need to physically enforce it (Eagleton). Within the digital context, where influencer culture and microcelebrity operate, distance-based aura becomes truly unobtainable. The disregard for spatiotemporal physics that cyberspace characterises reinforces this, as any distance implied when accessing a digital environment is one of modes of being, of physical versus immaterial, presenting an impassable obstacle (Kellerman 505-506). Despite the apparent physical closeness of interaction with a digital space, any engagement is separated by a screen, enforcing this separation. When engaging with the digital, users “resign themselves to never obtaining it, sublimating instead their sensual, consumer desire into ‘contemplation’” (Link 99). However, a substituted aura can be fabricated en masse within these digital spaces through the deployment of emotional trigger tools like nostalgia, recreating the experience of aura, if not the authentic aura itself. Authenticity Authenticity thus becomes the next point of consideration: a “unique apparition of distance” (Benjamin 104) implies authentic presentation, or at the very least a representation of truth. Truth as an ephemeral experience is described by Merleau-Ponty (xxiii) as “not the reflection of a pre-existing truth, but, like art, the act of bringing truth into being”. Benjamin (103) proposes that reproduction (as opposed to the original production of an artefact) via a technological catalyst undermines the authenticity of an original ‘image’ and, as a direct result, diminishes its aura. The reasoning is simple: reproduction results in a multiplicity of copies, but these are not the same as the image itself, merely simulacra or items “having the appearance but not the substance or proper qualities” (Cochrane 183) of the original. What, then, does this mean for a digital context where originality is even harder to establish? It is mentioned above that aura is contingent upon distance—and distance as both a physical and temporal construct is a moot point in the digital domain. Over and above the merely technical affordances, however, the shared (or networked, to be precise) nature of the space occupied implies that whatever artefact—image, performance, or other—is under review, it is synchronously viewed across all networked nodes. When Benjamin (106) noted that “a mass may have been no less suited to public presentation than a symphony” he foresaw how some artistic expressions could, indeed, be received simultaneously by a larger audience. From this perspective, Cochrane’s (177) assertion that every “audience member who sees the production as presented … accepts the final manifestation as the authored work in totality” is true, regardless of the reception by every other audience member at the same time. This example, or indeed any other ‘screened’ performance, translates as distance of a sort, but the near-simultaneity of Internet communications removes any consideration of temporal distance. As a “work of art becomes a construct with new functions” (Benjamin 107), one of its primary functions within the digital domain replaces temporal functions with display functions: influencers posting on social media, for example, are an ongoing exercise in performance that is entirely reliant on external observation or recognition for validation (Darvin). Phatic communication supersedes interpersonal connections as aggregated publics are formed based on ‘likes’: an interactive action taken to demonstrate affinity, making a quantitative metric of reach not only a source of personal validation, but also a subversion of legacy media hegemonies (Burgess & Green 89), which in turn promotes sharing behaviours and, ultimately, an even broader exhibition value that can be ascribed to the digital performance. Technological Reproduction Just as the undefinable residue of culture, history, and distance within art is diminished by the pressures of a technological society, so too do those pressures erode the society itself. The common denominator for both is industrialisation, and its technological catalyst is reproduction. Gustave Le Bon (xviii) foresaw the inevitable cultural decline within society, wherein a voice given