Virtual influencers: a challenge to trust and authenticity

Abstract

Influencers have come in many shapes and forms through the ages. Pre-social media had us voraciously attentive to the songs, films and/or relationships of the likes of Elvis Presley, James Dean and Marilyn Monroe amongst others. Social media expanded on that attention by bringing the lives of celebrities closer and made it possible for us to become voyeurs in the lives of celebrities like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and Bonang Matheba. Celebrities have become known as influencers in the social media space. An influencer is “someone who affects or changes the way that other people behave”, (Cambridge Dictionary 2021) and this ability has been translated into a tool to market products. This rise of social media influencers, whilst no doubt fun and entertaining, has led to a new breed of influencers, Virtual Influencers (VI). A VI according to Travers (2020) is “a digital character created in computer graphics software, then given a personality defined by a first-person view of the world and made accessible on media platforms for the sake of influence.” Of significant importance is that presently a VI is a product made by a team of creatives to fulfil a commercial function. VIs seek to commercially influence us for personal or commercial gain and in the process of doing so, our traditional norms of whom we trust to influence us and how we lay our bases for that trust are disrupted. Already teams of software creators have presented us with versions of ourselves with human influencers where they have been given a licence to use the identity of a human influencer in corporate branding and marketing. This raises the issue of trust and authenticity in human influencers who engage in this type of branding because when human influencers contract with consumer brands to make virtual avatars of themselves, these virtual avatars communicate independently of the ‘original’ human and are ‘controlled’ by the respective brand. iYanda is the VI for South African actress and radio personality Ayanda Thabethe made by a company called Avatar Company. Her individual brand of authenticity will confront challenges because the commercial brand iYanda exists simultaneously on social media. This issue of a blurring of authenticity and trust is further complicated when the VI is an entirely fictional identity created by a team of creators, who already have access to our online representations of self. The democratization of the internet has allowed for these representations to be copied and molded to suit their creators’ purpose, and in so doing, allow for biased, gendered representations of a new, constructed self for commercial gain which puts pressure on our current conception of authenticity.