Metaphors of Visibility: Rhetorical Practices in the Normalization of Individual Online Image Management

Abstract

Online image management has become a routine component of contemporary self-presentation. While popular media have concentrated on covering issues related to privacy, individuals in a social environment that prizes visibility face a more implicit mandate to balance concerns about overexposure against the perceived dangers of invisibility. A new class of promotional intermediaries, those that sell personal online reputation management services, have emerged to help individuals navigate the inevitability of “being seen” online with the urgency of image management. These companies apply strategies familiar in advertising and public relations to online self-presentation. This article explores how industry efforts to sell image management as an individual imperative draw on metaphors—including digital tattoo, digital footprint, and digital doppelgänger—to foster anxieties about how our digital identities are constructed, encountered, and interpreted. It argues these metaphors, which warn of the dangers of both visibility and invisibility, reveal a tension that informs popular discourse around digital self-presentation. Ultimately, this article considers how “strategic transparency” is offered to assuage fears, thereby generating a market for personal image management services.

Transparency, Publicity, Democracy, and Markets: Inhabiting Tensions Through Hybridity

“…However, in organizational contexts, transparency acts may be more accurately understood as the managed removal of concealment through making factual information accessible. Organizations thereby “reveal” themselves to audiences in response to challenges (but see also Draper 2020, for a discussion of how this works for individuals). This understanding of transparency speaks to the democratic ideal with which it is associated, where citizens demand accountability, grant (or not) legitimacy to different actors, and participate more effectively in political and civic life, based on the information they have (Habermas, 1984).…”

“…Transparency therefore constitutes more than simply disclosure. Information is revealed with some kind of intent to be seen and understood from a particular perspective (Rawlins, 2008); it is selected and targeted and as such, it does not eliminate power imbalances, but rather produces “new forms of power effects” (Flyverbom et al, 2015, p. 404; see also Draper, 2020).…”

“…Publicity is predicated on a strategic deployment of visibility that differentiates itself from transparency by the underlying self-interest, rather than collective interest, that prompts action. In competitive contexts where attention is a scarce resource (Webster, 2016), publicity helps organizations promote products, services, causes, and ideas to target audiences, increasing their popularity and reputation (Draper, 2020). Moreover, because publicity techniques are designed to excel in attracting attention, they are also indispensable to political life as mechanisms through which the public can be made aware of information relevant to collective concerns.…”

“…The global industry of promotional experts that ensures organizational interests are realized through nuanced and sometimes implicit modes of persuasion consolidates the power associated with publicity and its institutionalized practice (see, e.g., Draper, 2020). It stands in contrast with transparency, because it is in the business of framing or limiting the information that audiences can access, in the interests of the organization (A.…”

Tactics of invisibility: How people in vulnerable positions make datafied everyday life livable

“…The incitement for visibility is often seen in relation to social media self-presentations, part of influencers' brand management and visibility labor (Abidin, 2016). However, the common understanding of "pics or it didn't happen" (Draper, 2020(Draper, : 1628 refers not only to social media spheres. As Draper (2020) observes in the context of the online visibility management industry, there is an implicit tension created through obligations to be seen: the requirement to strike a balance between sharing too much and not sharing enough.…”