Bypassing the gatekeepers

About the author

Fiona Crawford

Fiona Crawford is the author of The Matilda Effect and The Rise of the Matildas: Inside the Women’s World Cup Campaign, and co-author of Never Say Die:...

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Non-fictionToday’s onslaught of available content (not just in books and writing) and the concurrent impossibility of wading through it all to select the new or the significant or the simple exploding pleasure of language (remember that?) is likely part of where the current malaise began, and not just for me. So much is on trend these days, with great swathes of the population all reading the same book simultaneously, and so much of this is generated by the star-making machinery of billion-dollar multinational publishing houses with gigantic marketing budgets.

Very online feelings

Non-fictionIn 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary declared ‘selfie’ its word of the year, and Twitter later declared 2014 ‘the year of the selfie’ after the term was mentioned more than ninety-two million times on the platform – a twelve-fold increase from the previous year. It was in this context that influencer selfies provided templates and scripts to spur more consumption and more desire, taking commodification of the body and the self to the next level. For instance, influencers popularised a whole ‘science’ around how to craft the most desirable faces through cosmetics and surgery, how to perform authenticity through ‘casual selfies’ that felt extra sincere but that also required extra behind-the-scenes effort, and how to assuage tensions arising from accusations of excessive plastic surgery and ‘fakery’. Selfies were reclaimed, transformed by their creators from expressions of mere vanity to useful tools of subversive frivolity. Influencer couples also sold us benchmarks of romantic perfection through carefully orchestrated couple photographs, love declarations on social media and ‘rules’ about how to be the perfect partner.

Less than human

Non-fictionWhat elevates Miku and makes her significant in our cultural landscape is her accessibility. Unlike traditional celebrities, who, even if they want to be accessible to their fans, only have so much time and can’t be perpetually available, Miku is software that anyone can buy and use. It only costs $200 and doesn’t require particularly advanced technical skills. Most of the people who produce Miku music are self-taught. One of the enduringly popular things about the concerts is that everything you see essentially comes from fans – the music, costuming and dance routines are all drawn from the expansive ‘Miku community’, where the lines between amateur and professional are deliberately blurred by everyone involved. You’re as likely to hear a song produced through a record label as you are one that was popularised by YouTube.