Public Health and Social Identities Surgery
When it comes to the digital age, people on social media platforms starting to shape their identities that may or may not differ from their ‘real’ personalities that participate in one larger society. Some aspects from ‘the real world’ are also defined as the digital communities, one of those in Public Health. According to Croner (2003), digital public health involves campaigns and projects launched on social media by KOLs to intervene or promote positive well-being health, this includes well-known campaigns such as Slip! Slop! Slap! To reduce skin cancer among young Australian adults as well as ice bucket challenge to raise awareness about amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) disease.
In these campaigns, of course, celebrities and microcelebrities are pioneers to not only influence their followers but also create and maintain a positive image in front of their public audience. Opposed to traditional celebrities, Marwick (2017) refers to this term as “the state of being well known to a niche group of people, and a practice whereby people present themselves as public personas, create affective ties with audience members, and view followers as fans”. As previously mentioned, the person themselves needs to be who the public wants them to represent so they must adapt and change accordingly to whom they called ‘fans’ or ‘followers’. This leads to my second point, self-branding, Khamis, Ang, and Welling illustrate this as a marketing action that continuously develops and maintain a social media persona’s reputation to influence a group of targeted audience, this is actually what microcelebrities are been doing, to show their personal values and reputation through several tactics and strategies.
One of the most common strategies is visual cosmetic surgery through social media platforms, this involves changing all or parts of the influencers’ identity, characteristics, or sometimes physical appearance to serve their purposes. Let’s take Instagram as our example, these days, we can easily see Instagram models or influencers using filters or editing apps to change how they look to attract more interactions. Furthermore, they can easily attract more potential influencer by posing parts of their body that is barely inappropriate, the fact that they are not afraid to show their body for the sake of building a personal image online. Ironically, microcelebrities always encourage their followers to respect their own body that they should embrace what they have but the thing is microcelebrities are not entirely being honest of what they did and have done to their own bodies.
Croner, C (2003), ‘Public Health, GIS, and the Internet’, Annual Review of Public Health, vol. 24, no. 1, pp.57-82.
Khamis, S, Ang, L & Welling, R (2016), ‘Self-branding, ‘micro-celebrity’, and the rise of Social Media Influencers’, Celebrity Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, pp. 191-208.
Marwick, A, (2017), ‘Microcelebrity, Self-Branding, and the Internet’, The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, pp. 1-3.
