Potential for Non-Institutionalized Creators of Entertainment and Educational Content to Influence the Audience

Section: New Media

This paper is the first attempt to understand, on Russian material, the nature of influence exerted by bloggers/influencers creating messages unrelated to socio-political discourse (musical clips, viral videos, commercial streams, videos about child rearing, cooking, healthy lifestyle, sports, traveling, hobbies and the like) on their audiences. Producers of this type of content do exert a frequently used influence on their audience, which is not limited to marketing one. It is possible to draw a conclusion about a huge potential of this influence, which might be useful for social and political mobilization. So far user activism encouraged by non-political influencers is mostly found online: the level of transit of active actions from online to offline with online users of edutainment blogger content is not very high, and “clicktivism” remains the most popular action users are prepared to perform at bloggers’ request.

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