It was a groggy morning earlier this week when I got up for a work travel and stumbled into the airport. As I nestled further into my cosy jacket, I heard someone call out in baby talk, “Arre waah! We got a great selfie, bubbu. Look who is already becoming an Insta star!” I swiveled around to see a young mom holding her infant while tapping away vigorously on the phone. I smirked to myself as I remembered another such incident a couple of months ago when I was lingering around a park and had overheard a mother call out to her teenage daughter, “So have you thought of your Instagram handle name yet? It is important to showcase your art properly you know.”
What these two separate but similar situations told me (apart from the glaring truth of how absorbed we are with social media) was that how massively creative careers have shifted in the recent past. Being an influencer, making videos, taking selfies is a legit thing now. The generation I grew up in, my parents used to be concerned about my name on the marks sheet. And now it is more about your username on an Insta feed.
Influencer economy is real, and it is booming. Because it did what creative people desperately needed – give a way to show individuality outside of the classrooms, to foster talents of those who would have been discarded as ‘not bright’ basis their math marks.
We all know that influencers have now come to be regarded at par with celebrities, some enjoying even more fame and success. But with the experiences in my line of work and the recent quality of reels that I have encountered, influencers seem no less than mini production houses of their own. They often conceptualize, script, produce, shoot, edit and amplify all their content end-to-end with dedicated thought and detailed execution. It’s like every reel is like a small movie, with top notch production quality, shot and released by the influencers to their audience.
Micro film making.
And that’s something to think about, isn’t it? A world where Instagram has become our TV/theatres, reels have become 90 second cinemas and influencers have become the stars.
