An unequal race for attention? A comparative case study between human and virtual influencers on social media
Year: 2022
Type: dissertation
Abstract: With the increasing number of virtual avatars as influencers on social media platforms, there is a growing need to better understand the para-social relationship between humans and virtual influencers. This paper examines how internet users respond to different development levels of human-like avatars on Instagram. The theoretical framework for this study is derived from Mashario Mori's (1970) theory of the uncanny valley, which was initially designed to describe the interaction between humans and robots and is applied to digital characters in social networks in this research. The methodology of this work is based on data mining and follows the CRIPS-DM model to find out how social media users respond to virtual influencers. For this purpose, three virtual avatars with different human-like appearance are compared with a human influencer from the same peer group on Instagram. The comparison is based on the evaluation of user comments from the first half of 2022 on the posted content of the named subjects. Opinion mining is used to evaluate the comments and calculate a sentiment score for the influencers. In addition, the respective engagement is collected and analysed. The results of this paper indicate that internet users react most positively to human influencers and negatively to the most human-like avatar. The virtual influencers, which differ significantly from humans in their appearance, achieve average sentiment scores in comparison. In conclusion, the results are placed in the current state of the research literature and recommendations are derived on how virtual avatars can be better integrated into social networks to avoid uncanny effects.
Source: Repositório do ISCTE-IUL
Author: Enzig, Joshua
Language: English
Subfield: Marketing
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7006518879