Speaker: A/Prof Lauren Gurrieri, RMIT University
Title: Curating a Consumption Ideology: Platformisation and Gun Influencers on Instagram
Date: Thu, 2nd Nov 2023
Time: 12:00pm – 2:00pm
Venue: Allan Barton Forum, Level 2, CBE Building 26C
Dr Anna Hartman is the host of this visit.
ABSTRACT
This study explores how a platform enables social media influencers to promulgate a consumption ideology. We show how gun influencers, or “gunfluencers,” use Instagram to link products, activities, and meanings to Second Amendment ideology – a gun-centric belief system in the United States colloquially known as “2A ideology.” Through a qualitative study of 25 Instagram gunfluencers, we identify a process of curating a consumption ideology wherein social media influencers employ four curatorial tactics: glamourising, demystifying, victimising, and tribalising. Findings suggest gunfluencers extend audiences and leverage algorithms to prescribe and model how supporters of 2A ideology should look, act, speak, feel, and consume. Our research contributes to understanding how consumption ideologies are promulgated in a digital, platformised world. In the context of U.S. gun culture, implications address the role of platformisation in supporting gun companies’ promotional efforts, despite government- and platform-based restrictions, and the political dimensions of influencer and consumer cultures.
BIO
Lauren Gurrieri is an Associate Professor of Marketing at RMIT University and the Co-Director of the Centre for Organisations and Social Change. Her research examines gender, consumption and the marketplace, with a focus on inequalities and harms (re)produced and experienced across consumer and digital cultures. She is a Board Member for GENMAC and an Associate Editor at the Journal of Marketing Management. Her research has been published in numerous leading academic journals, including the Journal of Advertising, Gender, Work & Organisation, Journal of Business Research, Marketing Theory and Consumption, Markets and Culture. She has been awarded over $600,000 in external research funding, including from the Australian Research Council. Her research has been featured across television, radio, print and online media, including outlets such as ABC News, The Guardian, ABC Radio National, the Conversation and the Financial Times.