I used to be more disturbed by the idea of young people aspiring to be influencers, and vacuous nature of such a “career”. But then I realized it’s not much different than any celebrity using that status to make $ on sponsorships, especially those completely unrelated to the roots of their celebrity status.
I guess that doesn’t exactly make the activity better, but it at least no longer feels like a further degeneration perpetrated by modern social networks. And it is a sort of democratization of the lucrative paid shill activities concentrated among the very few.
Back in the day celebrities were relatively few and you could ignore them while most "common" people were genuine.
Now that everyone is (or aspires to be) a "celebrity", you can trust no one. Sure, social media was never completely genuine but the fakeness was generally limited to bolstering someone's social status, not promote garbage from for-profit companies.
I think at least in this context it’s that you can’t trust random folks recommendations on the internet, or the appearance/lifestyle they present. In everyday irl encounters not too much has changed (again, in the context of paid influencer activity which is mostly relegated to the media— specifically digital social media.)
And when it comes to trying to find real opinions about potential purchases etc online, I don’t really use reviews anymore (and never looked for it in influencer world to begin with). These days if I want real opinions on something I search for product $X site:reddit.com and see what comes up. Even then I figure there’s some astroturfing but it’s still more reliable than, say, Amazon reviews.
Celebrities typically did _something else_, like pro sports, movies, Olympics, walking on the moon… but now we know that is unnecessary. Progress? Efficiency? IDK
The problem is they did something else, quite frequently unrelated to their fame. They mostly have no more claim to being an informed advocate for what they’re paid to sponsor than modern influencers. It doesn’t matter if they got an Olympic medal or something, they’re not in any expert position to recommend a specific brand of toothpaste or anything unrelated to their sport. In that respect they’re no different than an influencer. Maybe they’re a little worse? They’re using the actual legitimacy of their athletic achievement to lend a veneer of legitimacy to their completely unrelated (paid) opinion. Subverting what minor trust people might place in them as an authority in their area. At least with an influencer there’s not that sort of reputational arbitrage.
An improvement? I'm not sure, but I'd like to think through it.....
In the traditional case there are sponsorships where pre-existing fame unrelated to the target paid promotion is used to lend the target a false veneer of legitimacy through that fame. Not so great.
In the "Influencer" case a person has sort of deliberately & explicitly set themselves up as a broker-dealer [1] of attention they have aggregated from the masses of the internet population. Their endorsement of a product/service is no more valid than those with traditional pre-existing fame. So, also not so great.
And when I reference the democratization of this sort of paid shilling I'm thinking about it from the perspective of those doing the shilling: There are more opportunities to everyday people to get in on that by hustling to become an influencer. But there's another population to consider: those who consume the content & paid shilling.
The average consumer probably understands that the athlete/actor/whatever that is, for example, shilling a Citi Bank credit card has no special expertise in banking, comparative appraisals of different credit card offerings, etc. They know it's just a paid gig for the celebrity so the bank can forge a pleasant psychological association for consumers.
On the other hand, influencers often represent themselves & their paid endorsements as if they were authentic/organic opinions on whatever product or service they're being paid to shill.
In the later case it seems like there's a lot more potential for people to be deceived & not realize that the influencer's opinions were sold to the highest bidder and aren't authentic representations of their true thoughts on the product/service.
In that respect, no, not an improvement at all. Quite the opposite.
I guess that doesn’t exactly make the activity better, but it at least no longer feels like a further degeneration perpetrated by modern social networks. And it is a sort of democratization of the lucrative paid shill activities concentrated among the very few.