Being an online celebrity: Norms and expectations of YouTube’s beauty community

Abstract

This article is based on 22 months of online fieldwork examining YouTube's beauty community, specifically the beauty guru Bubz, her uploaded content, and user comments. We aim to conceptualize central community-specific dynamics and practices, particularly those related to self-presentation and identity-management and their affordances for legitimized online popularity. We explain how the guru's successful online persona is based on a performative blend of relatable, down-to-earth values paired with a more aspirational and worthy of emulation side.Being an "ordinary-user-turned-famous" is seemingly an advantage given the high relevance of authenticity when judging online celebrities. However, her inherent ordinariness also increases expectations of trustworthiness and honesty, precisely because she is, and continuous to perform daily, a regular user.

The effects of following celebrities’ lives via SNSs on life satisfaction: The palliative function of system justification and the moderating role of materialism

“…Like “traditional” celebrities, micro-celebrities construct their self as a brand, imagine the audience as fans, and strategically promote their public images for popularity (Marwick and boyd, 2011a; Senft, 2013). Based on the concept, scholars explain self-presentation and self-branding strategies by online personalities like “camgirls,” young women broadcasting their lives 24/7 (Senft, 2008), beauty gurus on YouTube (García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes, 2017), influencer mothers in SNSs (Abidin, 2015), and popular Instagram users (Abidin, 2016). Positioning the growing values of self-presentation in the context of larger social and technological transformations, other scholars address the construction of a public self and identity under the framework of “persona study” (Marshall, 2010, 2014) and have examined the creation of online personas in academia (Barbour and Marshall, 2012), in online gaming communities (Moore, 2011), and among fringe artists (Barbour, 2014).…”

'Hey, I like ur videos. Super relate!' Locating sisterhood in a postcolonial intimate public on YouTube

“…We then employed selective coding (Flick, 2011), elaborating some of the emerging themes in the initial categorization of comments. Conducting a critical analysis of the comments unraveled the tropes that reflected affirmations and contestations of practices, expectations and norms in an online channel (García-Rapp & Roca-Cuberes, 2017;Lange, 2014). It is through such a process that we arrived at identifying the salient categories of comments on YouTube, including aspirational, relatable, regulatory, and defensive.…”

Skin deep: Callout strategies, influencers, and racism in the online beauty community

“…Pruchniewska, 2018; Raun, 2018). But the norms and expectations that emerge within online communities, including those that develop around attitudes toward marginalized groups, “are dynamically built, negotiated, enacted, and enforced,” not just by influencers but through interaction with other community members (García-Rapp and Roca-Cuberes, 2017: 10). Therefore, this project seeks to understand how the affordances of social media platforms shape negotiations of these norms around issues of racism within the beauty community.…”