Page 134 - Prathima Volume 12

The impact of Influencer Culture on Digital Hyper-Reality:
A Case Study on the Food Consumption Patterns of Sri Lankan Urban Youth

When focusing on the SMI persona, Zach Bussey (2013) highlights that the SMIs
'generate a form of celebrity capital by cultivating as much attention as possible and
crafting an authentic personal brand via social networks' (Bussey, 2013 as cited in
Marshall and Redmond, 2016, p. 194). This construction of the SMI identity is visible
in the Sri Lankan context as well pertaining to food consumption, reviews and
blogging where individuals and groups have achieved a celebrity capital via a large
number of followers ranging from hundreds to thousands. The SMIs utilize descriptive
logs, photographs and rating techniques to review and recommend eateries in various
parts of the country for their followers. While the reliability and accuracy of the
projections of SMIs vary based on subjective preferences, there is a tendency for them
to influence the youth community. The number of followers solidifies the strength of
authority held by the SMIs where the quantities are correlated with the level of
soundness of judgment of the SMIs. This is further supported by the effect of
attractiveness the images of SMI profiles display, which present surreal photographs
projecting a sense of hyper-reality.

The concept of hyper-reality can be aligned with the works of Jean Baudrillard (1976)
who emphasizes that the excessive use of media has brought radical changes to the
culture that 'reality itself, as something separable from signs of it … vanished in the
information saturated, media dominated contemporary world' (as cited in Harrison &
Wood, 2003, p.1018). Authentic human experiences have been altered via media such
as the case of photographs and videos where the reality is only recognized through its
reproduction. This leads to a stage where life is viewed as art and the demarcation
between the real and fantasy is obliterated. This can be viewed even in the case of the
SMIs and youth in Sri Lanka where the reviews and blogs of the SMIs lead to a blurring
of the reality and the fantasy via photography and text that often mislead the youth.
Baudrillard examines this process where representations and reality are disconnected
from one another leading to an outcome referred to as simulacra in which the
representation becomes the anticipated reality, and the reality transforms into an
inferior representation.

In addition, the influence of SMIs on youth can be explained through the sense of
belonging and like-mindedness that youth embrace as explained through the social
identity theory. According to this, youth utilize the SMIs and the follower network to
create a sense of belonging which is tied to their personal identity (Khalid, Jayasainan
& Hassim, 2018). This leads to a platform where followers of similar demographics,
interests and lifestyles follow identical SMIs.

3. Objectives and Methodology

With the objective of gaining a deeper understanding of the influence of Social Media
Influencers (SMIs) on the food consumption patterns of the youth in the urban Sri

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