A Shoppable Life

Performance, Selfhood, and Influence in the Social Media Storefront

Bibliographic Data

ID12918503
AuthorsEmily Hund (University of Pennsylvania, corresponding author), Lee Mcguigan (0000-0003-3157-2944, University of Pennsylvania)
Year2019
Volume12
Issue1
Pages18-35
Publication date2019-02-08
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueCommunication Culture and Critique (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1753-9137 • E-ISSN: 1753-9129
PublisherOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/ccc/tcz004
OpenAlexW2918071506
LanguageEN
Citations received42
References cited17

This article develops a critical analysis of Instagram’s influencer economy by introducing and unpacking a phenomenon we call shoppable life. The term shoppable life is intended to capture the ideas that: (a) social media users perform lifestyles whose constituent elements can be bought; and (b) sociality increasingly unfolds within platforms that encode marketplace logics and capacities into their designs. Drawing on literatures about consumer culture, celebrity, and digital labor; interviews with 25 participants in Instagram’s influencer economy; and industry texts, we elucidate the power dynamics and contradictions manifested in constructing a shoppable life. We emphasize how social media users navigate the imperative to produce an “authentic” but branded and monetizable self, the personal risk they bear in doing so, and the stakeholders who mediate and profit from these productions. We also highlight conceptual points of entry for critical attention to the logic of shoppability, which increasingly pervades spaces and cultures

Aesthetics · Art · Clothing · Digital media · Epistemology · Fashion industry · Media studies · Netnography · Phenomenon · Political science · Power (physics · Social life · Social media · Social science · Sociality · Sociology · Unpacking · Consumer Behavior in Brand Consumption and Identification · Digital Marketing and Social Media · Gender, Feminism, and Media · Law

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