New paper / When looking like Justin Bieber is worse … / The Conversation / 07.05.2014

When looking like Justin Bieber is worse than dodgy stock trading

Vincent F. Hendricks

The Conversation 07.05.2014

A couple of months ago my 13-year-old son came to me with a true story. One of his acquaintances had passed on to him an Instagram profile with roughly 3,500 followers as a gift.

A few days later, my son and his friends met some famous rappers. They took a few selfies with them and posted the images on the Instagram profile. Almost immediately the number of followers exploded from 3,500 to almost 9,000. Then my son’s friend offered to buy the profile from him. There is apparently so much social value, acclaim and recognition associated with the account that it is now worth actual money.

Social capital is tangibly being traded for hard capital online now. Social media profiles function as online campaigns for selling an image or perception of yourself. It’s even stranger than bubble economics because at least when stocks are at the centre of hype, they are still worth something tangable to begin with.

In cyber-social bubble economics you don’t even need the fundamental value of the asset as long as you can get everybody to believe that everybody else believes that whatever you are selling is in some sense worth something to others.

Read the piece here

Also published as The Strange Bubble Economics of Selfies, Mashable, 15.04.2014