Comment on Hee Hee Ho Ho Ha Ha

• agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  I think sales touches on it, but still the persona you adopt is a “sales representative”. You are selling a product, your insincerity is locked to the product, with a few curated pithy anecdotes to flesh out the role. It’s closer to acting. You’re using charisma to make the sale, but you still take your hat off at the end of the day. You interact with a few individuals over the course of the day, and likely never see them again. If you do have an ongoing relationship with clients, it’s one-on-one and segregated. And you can choose how much you want to rely on a persona, you can do sales from a position of relative sincerity if you actually believe in the product.

  With streamers, their identity is the product. They aren’t using charisma to sell cars or vacuum cleaners or medical equipment, they are selling their personality. A sales representative doesn’t have to change their being when market research demands a change in product. If a streamer wants to change their product, they have to change themselves, or at least their persistent persona. Because it isn’t one-on-one and segregated, they have to be their persona all the time for thousands of anonymous commenters at once. It’s fundamentally existential. You can’t do it another way, it’s endemic to the industry

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  • Gorilladrums@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Online personalities, like professional streamers, don’t actual reveal their real personalities and identities. They use personas that are carefully curated to grow and maintain their audience. These personas are the brand, that’s what they’re selling. Like sure, you need to be witty and charismatic to draw people in, but that could be said about any job in any field. The same could be said about people changing due to their job. A person’s job is a big part of their identity, and so it makes sense that streamers are influenced by their jobs like everybody else. I don’t see anything that’s uniquely stressful to being a professional streamer.

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    • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      It’s not a question of stress, it’s a question of soul-sucking. Pulling out what makes you, you. Wearing that persona in all your frequent streamed behavior, especially when it’s ostensibly “you” to begin with, definitely warps your mind over time.

      If you wear the mask all the time, it starts to cling. You start to become the marketable character.

      The unique thing is the way it directly and fundamentally interacts with the worker’s personality. Yes charisma is broadly useful in any industry, but this is the industry that is selling the charisma itself. The personality is the product.

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