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The Glitz and Glamour Platform Economy : = Issues for Instagram Monetization for Influencers in Nairobi, Kenya.

Record Type:	Language materials, manuscript : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	The Glitz and Glamour Platform Economy :/
Reminder of title:	Issues for Instagram Monetization for Influencers in Nairobi, Kenya.
Author:	Njathi, Anne Wangari.
Description:	1 online resource (410 pages)
Notes:	Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-01, Section: B.
Contained By:	Dissertations Abstracts International85-01B.
Subject:	Software. -
Online resource:	click for full text (PQDT)
ISBN:	9798379866051

The Glitz and Glamour Platform Economy : = Issues for Instagram Monetization for Influencers in Nairobi, Kenya.
Njathi, Anne Wangari.

The Glitz and Glamour Platform Economy :Issues for Instagram Monetization for Influencers in Nairobi, Kenya. - 1 online resource (410 pages)

Source: Dissertations Abstracts International, Volume: 85-01, Section: B.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--North Carolina State University, 2023.

Includes bibliographical references

As in other parts of the world, Instagram has become a popular platform in Africa- particularly Nairobi, Kenya-for socializing, communicating, entertainment, and informationseeking, and as a thriving digital marketplace. The platform also permits its users to commodify their private lives online to make a living. As a result, the rapid rise of Instagram influencers, also known as content creators, is scaling up in Africa as well. Therefore, it is important to investigate how influencers in developing world contexts, such as Nairobi, are contributing to the larger dynamics of the digital economy given its susceptibility to foreign power, different cultural and socioeconomic dynamics. Although it is generally understood that influencers are creating real value for advertisers, there is lack of consensus on what constitutes how the commodification of self translates into incentivization, especially in emerging markets whose practices and culture are thoroughly differentiated. Simultaneously, Instagram does not distinguish how influencers monetize their activities online, despite being the current leading platform for influencer marketing.Scholars have focused on Instagram affordances as a digital workplace, self-curation, aesthetic and representation of self, potential for branding and marketing endeavors, and labor, but less so on the specific idiosyncrasies of the economic incentive afforded to influencers. This study interrogated the practices and subjectivity of Instagram influencers in Africa as commodified subjects of a global cultural phenomenon of platformization. First, I investigated the economic incentives tied to influencers' activities and practices on Instagram. Second, I explored how Instagram economic incentives impact the activities and practices as well reproduction of culture given the commodification of self for influencers interest. Finally, I analyzed who, how, and why this incentivization occurs. To answer these questions, I leveraged qualitative methods, such as semistructured interviews, app walkthrough, and document analysis to further interrogate how Instagram influencers in Nairobi are commodifying their private lives to make a living and how policy makers are attempting to regulate and legislate platformization, as an emerging new media economy, taking root in Nairobi. In addition, I used actor network theory to identify and map out the actors involved in the Instagram economy, the obfuscated influencer model adapted by Instagram through mapping out the actors, nuanced complexities, interconnections, messiness, and dynamics of everyday life of an influencer in Nairobi.Findings of study indicate that platformization, as an emerging new media economy, is taking root through its infrastructure, technological affordances, influencer model and ascendancy in Kenya, a developing economy, in rather different shape and format, but strikingly not very different from those in the West. In this process, systems of power and inequalities, including an entrenched digital divide, digital colonialism, and cultural dynamics are getting reproduced, influenced, and reshaped as Nairobi influencers produce themselves as commodified subjects to fit the global Instagram operating model. The findings reiterate the pressing need for deeper investigation into platformization in emerging markets. Future investigations should account for politics of inclusion, future of work, power systems, globalization of technology and digital colonialism, cultural hybridity, and platform governance as scholars assess platformization in the Global South. Further research should be conducted to answer questions of subjectivity through the commodification of self, the legitimization of platforms as digital workplaces, and the sustainability of the creator industry.

Electronic reproduction.
Ann Arbor, Mich. :
ProQuest,
2024

Mode of access: World Wide Web

ISBN: 9798379866051Subjects--Topical Terms:

574116
Software.
Index Terms--Genre/Form:

554714
Electronic books.

The Glitz and Glamour Platform Economy : = Issues for Instagram Monetization for Influencers in Nairobi, Kenya.
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