Striving for Conspicuousness. How Micro-Influencers Construct and Display Social Status on Instagram.

By looking at the ubiquitous presence of social media in our everyday life, we are thrust into an ongoing flow of content aimed at stimulating our emotional reactions and gaining our attention even just for the time necessary to click the like button. Digital content, affect, attention, and metrics: these are the building blocks of a contemporary economy which values attention and the neoliberal imperative of creativity and self-realisation, all elements that change the current understanding of status and prestige accorded to different individuals. In this context, this dissertation focuses on the issue of social status in the current Western society, in particular by looking at how status is constructed and displayed across the online and offline domains by a category of highly visible and branded personae, the so-called social media influencers.