Chasing fame, curating flow: logics of everyday celebrification on Instagram in Taiwan – a mixed-methods analysis of follower and following metrics

This study investigates how ordinary Taiwanese Instagram users enact celebrification – the everyday practices through which visibility, recognition and self-presentation become intertwined with digital metrics. By operationalising míng (名, fame), that is, follower count and liú (流, flow), that is, following count, as measurable indicators that project cultural meanings, this paper proposes a method for quantifying and interpreting the relational dynamics of fame in a digital platform environment. Using 4,066 account-level observations (8,132 metric values) and qualitative analyses of user profiles and hyperlinks, the study identifies three logics of celebrification: Business card, Flyer and Self. Rather than treating metrics as mere numbers, the study reads them as culturally encoded signs of visibility and recognition, signs that mediate how users imagine themselves and their place in the attention economy. The analysis suggests that míng and liú can be understood as mutually constitutive dynamics rather than opposing forces. Their correlations fluctuate with user visibility, revealing a layered structure of ordinary celebrification. By foregrounding míng and liú as cultural signs at the interface level, the study extends celebrity studies beyond Western perspectives, offering a model for observing fame where numbers meet cultural meaning.