Notes
1 The encoding of self-help as political responsibility was indeed more prevalent in the early self-help cultures that, at least in the United States, were initially emphasizing idealism and self-sacrifice over entrepreneurial personality traits like creativity, domination and masterfulness (Hampel, 2020: 220).
2 For instance, the bureaucracy of colonial enterprises in Africa, as Sloan Mahone argues (2007), preferred psychologized explanations over socio-economic ones for analyzing anti-colonial dissent as the psy-apparatus partly developed by studying the cultural other (Nehring et al, 2020: 8).
3 Furthermore, according to Walter Ong, “The electronic age is also an age of ‘secondary orality’, the orality of telephones, radio, and television, which depends on writing and print for its existence” (2013: 3).
4 The term “niche internet micro celebrity” (nimcel) has recently entered the lexicon of popular media cultures, for instance (Taylor, 2022). On the other hand, Marwick prefers the term “subcultural micro-celebrity” over “niche microcelebrity” as the former is able to account for the often subcultural communities that give rise to micro-celebrities (2015).
5 For Senft (2008), the figure of the camgirl was empowering, for the camgirls she studied were realizing the feminist slogan “the personal is political” by performing a confessional style. However, while technologies can be empowering for some, for others usually located in in the Global South are disempowering. Wang notes that in the Chinese camgirl industry the aspirational labor is combined with desperational labor: camgirls in the Chinese industry “employment status difers from that of the self-employed Western social media content creators, because of its inherent desperation” (Wang, 2021: 622).
6 These two difer for Abidin, with the micro-celebrities preceding the “platform revolution” being niche, homemade, and hobby-driven while the internet celebrities are global, multi-platformed, and vocation-driven. Here, I will not be strictly following Abidin’s typology and using the terms interchangeably as these diferences are not important for the purpose of this chapter.
7 As Hendriks puts it:
Consequently, and despite all its rhetorical strengths, charismatic legitimacy is relatively unstable, since it is vulnerable to de-legitimizing crises. If information surfaces in public that contradicts the guru’s self-presentation as a bearer of charisma, then many of the followers could quickly lose their faith and interest, throwing the guru’s position as guru into crisis.
(2017: 8)
8 This information can be found at the following link: www.udemy.com/user/ kainramsay/ and www.udemy.com/course/life-coaching-a-complete-guide/#ins tructor-1
9 Here, I use the term “English-speaking” instead of “global” so as not to reproduce the narrative that English equals “global”. In reference to the rise of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), Taskeen Adam writes on the issue:
“…regional” MOOC platforms have emerged since 2015, supporting other countries and languages: e.g. XuetangX (China), MiríadaX (Spain), MéxicoX (Mexico), France Université Numérique (France), EduOpen (Italy), ThaiMOOC (Thailand), SWAYAM (India), and Edraak (Jordan) […] These platforms are termed “country-specific” and “regional” while the platforms from the US and UK are termed “global” because they are in English […] reinforcing the narrative that to be global is to be Western.
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