This 90-minute group discussion with internet celebrities based in North-East Scotland will explore their work, practices and traditions, creative processes, and experience as public figures.
There is a small but growing cohort of internet users from the North-East of Scotland who could be considered internet celebrities: people whose celebrity status is native to the internet, who are highly visible to both human and machine eye, and who attract and retain an audience – often in the form of followers or likes. The tactics that people deploy in achieving fame online are varied and many attain fame through an engaging performance of everydayness. In the case of North-East internet celebrities, this can take the form of using (North-East Scots/Doric) dialect, Ecotypifying international social media traditions and lore, referencing or featuring local places and materiality, using localised folk speech forms such as proverbs, sayings, phrases etc. Interestingly, their online reach, creativity, and willingness to use their cultural knowledge and heritage, interacts with the affordances, traditions, and norms of the platforms to produce altered or new practices that can, in turn, impact offline life.
Chaired by Simon Gall, Public Engagement Officer and Postgraduate Student at the Elphinstone Institute.
16 and above – it may contain profanity and sexual references