And the second keynote at the AANZCA 2025 conference is by the great Crystal Abidin. She begins by introducing herself as an anthropologist of Internet cultures, building especially also on standpoint theory and triangulation as a methodological framework. Her work has focussed especially on longitudinal ethnographies of Internet celebrity and social media pop cultures; she is best known, of course, for her work on influencer ecologies and economies.
This addresses communities and culture, functions and sociality, and structures and politics; over its several iterations, this work has examined influencers as a job description and culture of practice, as a concept and a role, and as platforms for amplification. Influencers are opinion leaders, represent an attention economy, direct information flows, represent the populace, exercise demotic authority, and gain shadow visibility. The influencer industry is complex and controversial, but must be understood from all these perspectives.
There is also a need to look at influencer culture well beyond the dominant cultures of the United States and the Anglosphere; influence and influencer markets operate very differently across different countries. There are also significant differences across platforms – and TikTok serves as a particularly salient example. The platform is now highly prominent in Korea, for instance, but its entry into the Korean market was complicated by competition from Instagram and its perception as a Chinese app and a space for problematic and vulgar activities. It broke through during the pandemic, when it was associated with viral K-Pop dance challenges.
Such phenomena must also be understood from an appropriate standpoint and positionality for interpretation; there is a need to reflect on how these colour the analysis. Several possibilities are available to researchers here, and each will lead towards a different perspective.
For instance, vitality on TikTok is now critical to success as a K-Pop artists (and for artists more generally); this is in part through the popularity of K-Pop dance challenges, and this has led to K-Pop music videos (which fans might wish to emulate) mostly using dance moves which can be easily emulated by fans and recorded for sharing as video optimised for mobile phones.
Similarly, we have seen a growth in influencer videos promoting ‘morning routines’, but these are fundamentally designed for a particular class of users with the disposable time and income to devote to such routines in pursuit of self-improvement and conspicuous consumption. Other influencer videos copy the optics of such videos, signalling virtue without any indication that there is any distinct commitment to environmental or other action behind it.
In turn, physical stores are now also advertising all sorts of products ‘as seen on TikTok’ to various types of consumer audiences (even those who are not themselves using TikTok); this is blatant consumerism without any commitment to the environmental or other values that might have been present in some of the original values, and often also engages in blatant cultural appropriation.
Small online businesses also engage in such practices, of course, and are posting product and packaging videos, sometimes even personalised to individual customers. They might include freebies and other incentives for further consumption, often without any obvious coherent logic to the choice of these aspects – but such inclusions are a result of the competition between small businesses for followers and customers on TikTok.
Businesses may also engage in detailed video depictions of the source materials used in the creation of handmade products, the thought processes and labour skills involved, the messiness of such work, and so on – often exaggerating the complexity of such work in order to build a new customer base.
TikTok shops engage in a variety of strategies for this – one of these, for instance, is guilt-tripping, which emphasises the consequences of not supporting the shop. This might present the shop as the underdog in competition with major commercial operators, and draw on the shop’s brand biography. Customer engagement with such videos – creating an affective connection with the underdog – helps train the TikTok algorithm to increase the visibility of such videos.
Such videos often also engage in a certain element of greenwashing, though this might not work for much longer as audiences are becoming increasingly wise to such storytelling techniques. Misleading environmental claims have been common in the past, however, and have ignored the environmental impacts of international shipping and plastic packaging.
