Influencer Culture and the Commodification of Identity: Self-Presentation, Consumption and Social Status in Digital Society

Abstract

Influencer culture has become a powerful social and economic force shaping identity, consumption, and status in digital society. This comprehensive narrative review examines how influencers transform appearance, lifestyle, emotions, relationships, and everyday experience into commercially valuable content. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship from sociology, media studies, cultural studies, psychology, and consumer research, the review analyses identity commodification, strategic self-presentation, aspirational consumption, digital inequality, and platform governance. Findings show that influencers operate simultaneously as content producers, personal brands, and marketable products. Their effectiveness depends on perceived authenticity, relatability, expertise, attractiveness, and parasocial closeness, which strengthen trust, shape brand attitudes, and encourage purchasing decisions. Influencer content also links products with confidence, belonging, happiness, mobility, and social recognition, thereby turning consumption into a means of identity construction and status display. However, these processes may intensify social comparison, fear of missing out, body dissatisfaction, material aspiration, and status anxiety. Visibility and commercial opportunity remain unequally distributed because algorithms, cultural capital, race, gender, class, geography, and brand preferences influence who receives attention and economic reward. Additional concerns include creator burnout, emotional and aesthetic labour, privacy loss, commercial sharenting, and the normalisation of narrow standards of beauty and success. Nevertheless, influencer culture can support representation, community-building, social advocacy, and responsible consumption through practices such as deinfluencing. Overall, influencer culture should be understood not merely as a marketing practice but as a broader social system connecting identity, labour, platform power, consumption, and inequality. Greater transparency, media literacy, ethical regulation, and inclusive research are therefore required across digital societies.