{"id":3341,"date":"2014-04-18T11:06:42","date_gmt":"2014-04-18T11:06:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.vince-inc.com\/vincent\/?p=3341"},"modified":"2014-05-18T12:18:49","modified_gmt":"2014-05-18T12:18:49","slug":"new-paper-when-looking-like-justin-bieber-is-worse-the-conversation-07-05-2014","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.vince-inc.com\/vincent\/?p=3341","title":{"rendered":"New paper \/ When looking like Justin Bieber is worse … \/ The Conversation \/ 07.05.2014"},"content":{"rendered":"

When looking like Justin Bieber is worse than dodgy stock trading<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent F. Hendricks<\/p>\n

The Conversation 07.05.2014<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s even stranger than\u00a0bubble economics\u00a0because at least when stocks are at the centre of hype, they are still worth something tangable to begin with.<\/p>\n

In cyber-social bubble economics you don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Read the piece here<\/a><\/p>\n

Also published as The Strange Bubble Economics of Selfies<\/a>, Mashable, 15.04.2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3341","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media","category-posts"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t