In the more gatekept traditional media, a coaching guru would for instance get a ten-minute television slot in a morning show or a one-page interview in the popular press, that is, the guru’s performance would be subject to the editorial processes of the medium. On a platform, the guru possesses “unlimited airtime”—potentially infinite temporal and spatial bandwidth for writing, speaking, and generally curating their persona. This is a shift from representational to presentational media, as David Marshall calls this transition, bringing about the possibility of articulating a “widening dimension of the public self” (Marshall, 2010: 40), a self that is distributed throughout the digital information landscape and scrutinized by audiences and followers. In reference to the celebrity culture that Marshall writes about, the representational regime of traditional media bent heavily toward the editorial function of the medium and its managers, as “culture and politics have relied upon a media filtering system to organize and hierarchize what is valuable, significant, and important” (2010: 45). Conversely, in presentational media, this filtering is not the responsibility of an external editor but largely becomes a task that the (aspiring) celebrities need to address themselves or with the assistance of independently contracted social media managers. Coaching gurus curate their online identities via personal or partly outsourced (depending on the budget) curatorial labor coalescing aesthetic considerations around design, visuals, layouts, logos, texts, photography and audio, and organizational concerns around pricing, subcontracting, networking, hiring, collaborating, and micro-managing relations with followers. In other words, platforms confront coaches (and cultural producers in general) with the apparatus of curation as the editorial function is now theirs to manage.
The platformization of the coaching persona then gives access to technological afordances for potentially elevating a coach to a micro-celebrity (or even more alluringly a proper celebrity). The term micro-celebrity refers not simply to a recognizable person within a niche online milieu, say about climbing, perfumes, or wines, but to an online practice that involves constructing audiences as fans by curating a carefully crafted personage (Marwick, 2015).4 It is defined less by the number of followers but by a set of techniques that correspond to laboring skills: “a self-presentation technique in which people view themselves as a public persona to be consumed by others, uses strategic intimacy to appeal to followers, and regards their audience as fans” (Marwick, 2015: 337). The prehistory of online micro-celebrity, dates back to the models of the erotic web cam industry, who are one of the earliest examples of online self-presentation via these techniques and laboring skills (Abidin, 2018; Jones, 2020; Senft, 2008). For Theresa Senft (2008), who popularized the term micro-celebrity in reference to the camgirls of the late 1990s, the micro-celebrity refers to “a new style of online performance in which people employ webcams, video, audio, blogs, and social networking sites to ‘amp up’ their popularity among readers, viewers, and those to whom they are linked online” (2008: 25).5 The camgirls were also the “beta testers” of all the subsequently established labor practices that were employed to achieve internet fame, including the “building of self as a brand, and engagement in a specific form of emotional labor” (2008: 8). Micro-celebrity labor difers from that of the traditional celebrity most notably in the ways it connects with fans by practicing intimacy, authenticity, accountability, and especially continuous relatability (Lewis, 2020; Raun, 2018).6 The labor of relating regards the creation and management of ongoing relationships with fans, even if these relationships may not always be pleasant to the platform curator; for instance, in the ethnographic research of Dumont a male microcelebrity in professional rock-climbing has to communicate with followers in a way that he appears inspirational and engaged, while he does not particularly like or even feels uncomfortable with these followers (Dumont, 2017). More than that, relational labor is a key for deterring legitimacy crises or potential canceling (Ng, 2023),7 as micro-celebrities constantly have to appear as authentic, open, transparent, and accountable to their audiences. While the traditional celebrity would maintain distance and unreachability from fans, the micro-celebrity must be confessional, reciprocal, and engaged, that is “curate a persona that feels continuously authentic, interactive, and celebrity-like regardless of the size or state of one’s audience” (Abidin, 2018: 12). Navigating platform afordances, then, as a micro-celebrity (or often as an ordinary user) entails the cultivation of communicative skills that can be put to work for instilling trust to the followers (Lewis and Christin, 2022; Lewis, 2020; Raun, 2018).
Curating Mindsets, Micro-Celebrities, and Intimacies
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