Microcelebrities’ identity construction on social media: A systematic review and synthesis

Abstract

Over the past decade, a robust body of scholarship on microcelebrity has emerged, occasioning several review studies of this growing field of research. Extant reviews on microcelebrity have mostly focused on microcelebrities’ strategic communication or audiences’ attitudes, but no review has specifically focused on microcelebrities’ identity. Echoing the call for more attention to this particular aspect in recent reviews, this article examines 97 empirical studies published from 2010 to 2022 that focused on microcelebrities’ identity construction on social media. Our analysis identified various research trends and synthesized microcelebrities’ identity tactics into 10 categories. We situate the findings within current discussions of platformized cultural production and microcelebrity’s role in it by drawing on and extending Duffy et al.’s ‘nested precarities’ framework to account for microcelebrities’ identity work on social media. The review’s key contribution is the conceptualization of microcelebrities’ identity-related tactics and its embedding in the formidable precarities of platform ecosystems.