Social Media influencers have become indispensable promoters of ideas about acceptable living standards, particularly for the younger generation. The health messages they portray through their pages influence people’s perceptions and, hence, the behavior change they embrace (Karamustafic et al., 2020). This encoding process entails creating content that resonates with the influencers’ ethical values and standards while posting on social media such as Instagram, Gram, YouTube, and TikTok.
Developing messages that support both the influencer’s brand’s sentiment and the audience’s expectations is crucial as part of this process. Influencers avoid posting pictures and using words and concepts their followers would not appreciate. Some studies have shown that the physical appearance of influencers translates to determining how influencer messages will be received (De Jans et al., 2022). For example, the research states that in cases where overweight influencers endorse junk food, the tweens are likely to select healthier foods than when the thin ideal influencers embrace the same message. This vividly demonstrates the dichotomy that is characteristic in the so often criticized influencer marketing concerning body image and health communication.
The result of such encoding is rather dramatic. Fans use the process of wishful identification, which means that they want to be like the influencers portrayed by those influencers. This desire can cause major behavior modification; for example, a man or woman might switch to a healthier eating or dressing code. However, audience decoding, which is the second step in the process, is affected by cultural and social factors (Mambrol, 2020). People in different age ranges may perceive content differently because of things they have learned in society.
The second theoretical angle to be discussed in this paper is Stuart Hall’s Encoding/Decoding model, which underlines that communication is dialogic in nature (Media-studies, 2022). In reception, audiences can accommodate, resist, or contest messages from the dominant-hegemonic perspective, whether negotiated or oppositional.
In conclusion, social media influencers may be said to act as highly influential encoders of the given lifestyle paradigms. Hence, decoding occurs in a way in which different audiences may produce different outcomes that either reiterate or subvert the normative messages. All of this illustrates the importance of understanding these dynamics to be better positioned to think about how such communication happens in social media.
References
De Jans, S., Hudders, L., Naderer, B., & De Pauw, V. (2022). Impact of thin-ideals in influencer posts promoting healthy vs. unhealthy foods on Tweens’ healthy food choice behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 13. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.789069
Media-studies. (2022, August 27). Stuart hall’s reception theory | Encoding and decoding the media. Media Studies. https://media-studies.com/reception-theory/
Karamustafic, S., Stockmaster, T., Palladina, S., Harris, A., & Perloff, R. M. (2020). Social media influencers: Who they are and how they influence.
Mambrol, M. (2020, November 7). Analysis of Stuart Hall’s encoding/Decoding. Literary Theory and Criticism. https://literariness.org/2020/11/07/analysis-of-stuart-halls-encoding-decoding/
