Example of audience capture
Where Perry was a picky eater, Nikocado devoured everything he could, including finally Perry himself. The rampant appetite for attention caused the person to be subsumed by the persona.
Both performer and the viewers can hypnotise each other
We often talk of “captive audiences,” regarding the performer as hypnotizing their viewers. But just as often, it’s the viewers hypnotizing the performer. This disease, of which Perry is but one victim of many, is known as audience capture, and it’s essential to understanding influencers in particular and the online ecosystem in general.
Road to hell is paved with good intentions
While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it’s actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.
Looking glass effect
Our personalities develop as a role we perform for other people, fulfilling the expectations we think they have of us. The American sociologist Charles Cooley dubbed this phenomenon “the looking glass self.”
Michelangelo phenomenon
When we lived in small tight-knit communities, the looking glass self helped us to become the people our loved ones needed us to be. The “Michelangelo phenomenon” is the name given to the semi-conscious cycle of refinement and feedback whereby lovers who genuinely care what each other think gradually grow closer to their partner’s original ideal of them.
Online vs previously offline communities
Gradually we’re all gaining online audiences, and we don’t really know these people. We can only gauge who they are by what some of them post online, and what people post online is not indicative of who they really are.
Caricature
As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.
Influencers forgetting their own identity
Similarly, as influencers glimpse their idealized online personas reflected back at them on screens, they too are in danger of becoming eternally besotted by how they appear, and in so doing, forgetting who they were, or could be.
In politics, audience capture is also common
Audience capture is a particular problem in politics, due to both phenomena being driven by popular approval. On Twitter I’ve watched many political influencers gradually become radicalized by their audiences, starting off moderate but following their increasingly extreme followers toward the fringes.
Self-awareness is the cure
I was aware of the pitfall long before I became an influencer. I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they’d constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.
Self-awareness and resistance
It was clear to me that the only way to resist becoming what other people wanted me to be was to have a strong sense of who I wanted to be. And who I wanted to be was someone immune to audience capture, someone who thinks his own thoughts, decides his own destiny, and above all, never stops growing.
Trap in the hall of fame
This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one’s own persona.