Writers Club: Under The Influence

Photography by Audrey Roh

Below, the winning respondents to our latest Writers Club prompt: “We want to hear your thoughts on influencers, being influenced by the so-called influencers, and everything surrounding the influencer-world.”

Influencers seem to be the new hot, fancy, rich career that everybody wants to have when they grow up.

I used to think the whole thing was lame and a joke, but after focusing more and more on social media myself, I have come to realize it is a lot more work than people realize. Influencers basically do a lot of social media planning, content creation, marketing, and then get the fun part of working with different brands/companies. It is the marketing of an individual's self-brand rather than for somebody else.

I have mixed feelings on influencers at this point because I admire all of the hard work they put into entertaining their followers with constant creativity and original content, BUT I hate hate hate when some influencers are fake on their platform. They convince their followers life is easy, picture-perfect, and stress-free when it is never actually that way. They will promote brands that don’t actually work just to get the money from working with a brand. My mind always asks, “Why lie?” I know it is hard to be authentic, sensitive, and vulnerable for thousands of followers to see, but in my opinion, those are the best influencers. The ones that are just like normal people; they show their struggles. They share unique and personal stories, and they aren’t afraid to share who they truly are. Authentic influencers should be the only ones to exist; they want what's best for their followers. They don’t exploit their followers-- they strive to entertain.

By Anastasia

As someone who frequently posts on/watches/ interacts with Instagram, Youtube, and various other social media platforms, subscribes to Curology products, has tried Prose, and gets Parade content on my feed from just about every person I follow (or so it seems), I can definitively say influencers do not go unnoticed in my digital world.

However, I wouldn’t say I particularly like this. I have a whole bunch of conflicting feelings about... all of it. I don’t want to feel pressured to consume, especially under the lens of “this is cool because a cooler person than you likes ( aka was paid to like) it,” but not everything being pushed by influencers is inherently bad or something I wouldn’t be interested in... which is how they get you. In a way, I also admire the ability to find a way to make a living outside of the norm. I would be lying if I said I’ve never dreamed about making a living from just my existence. But it is the intense push for capitalizing off of image, status, and privilege is what makes “influencing” feel all so uncomfortable. However, the Age of the Influencers feels inevitable, so why not try to start embracing it?

By Anonymous

Influencers give me mixed emotions…

On the one hand, I admire influencers that are honest and give good insight into whatever they are influencing us about, like cool clothes, nice makeup products, or even current events they share for their community. On the other hand, some influencers don’t necessarily do much, and they use their following for “clout,” and it’s mainly just an ego boost for them. As an influencee, I definitely feel the need to follow people that I actually care about and that work hard for their followers to give good feedback. I am definitely someone that can be easily influenced, and I’m sure a lot of people can say the same-- so you always want to follow people that care. I am not going to lie, if I had the opportunity to be an influencer, I would definitely take that chance, but the digital world is a scary place. Although being an influencer seems like you’re in a picture-perfect world, I personally do not want to deal with the ongoing hate and people stalking your every move. I’m glad that being an influencer is becoming an up-and-coming career, but people also don’t realize that it’s more than just posting a photo on Instagram a day. I hope that people realize that these are just normal people living a bit of a “cooler” life than us super-normal people, but for us to be able to continue to spread as much positivity as we can.

By Ngoc