OUR PROJECTS

Aims & Objectives

This project has focused on online ‘influencer culture’ and how it affects girls and young women. It was our aim to explore the definitions, opportunities, and challenges that influencer culture has with girls and young women. Our objectives were to:

• Understand how girls and young women navigate their media diets and content created by influencers

• Capture the perspectives of girls and young women aged 9-15, identifying intervention points through a new practice model and toolkit

• Disentangle the risks and opportunities for girls and young women

• Identify ways of empowering girls to harness opportunities and navigate risk online

 

The project findings and outputs have met the above aims, focusing on the co-production of a toolkit for girls, educators, and parents to use to navigate influencer culture. The project addresses gaps in current mental health research by providing youth led insights on the emerging study of influencer culture.

 

The toolkit provides three key contributions to the understanding and navigation of influencer culture:

1. Outlines girls and young women’s perspectives on and experiences of influencer culture

2. Identifies the implications of understanding and responding to influencer culture

3. Provides youth led recommendations based on empirical evidence to address the opportunities and challenges that girls and young women face when navigating influencer culture

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Key Messages

The key messages from the project are as follows:

• The most effective interventions would start as early as possible, when girls are receptive to adult messaging and guidance and when the risks and harms of influencer culture have not become too embedded.

• With all age groups, interventions must be both youth-centred and critically informed. This means that the complexity and ambivalence around what constitutes influencer culture and the effects of influencer culture for differently situated girls must be recognised. Girls should be encouraged to offer their own meanings and adults must avoid overly pathologising the issue, with due recognition of the opportunities and benefits. Yet, fatalism and poor awareness among girls must be addressed via critically informed interventions.

• Critically informed interventions would push back against binary notions of risk, harm, opportunity, and benefit and would address a continuum of outcomes of influencer culture for girls and would connect the risks and harms to the wider social contexts in which they are given meaning.

 

Overly individualistic approaches that focus on individual resilience and digital literacy should be avoided in favour of addressing the intersections between digital affordances and girls’ agency. The approach should also involve recognising the constraints on agency and the ambivalence that can arise due to distinctions between cognitive awareness and skills and socio-emotional challenges.