Becoming a micro-celebrity requires a degree of self-commodification to create a “publicizable personality”; as Ernest Sternberg writes, “performers now intentionally compose their persona for the market, and do so through methods learned from the celebrity world.” The micro-celebrity self, like that of celebrities more generally, is carefully constructed and performed to attract attention and publicity. Laura Fitton, a social media marketer who rose to fame as her persona, Pistachio, describes writing her Twitter account as “kind of like being a newspaper columnist”: “I get that that’s not a hundred percent me … But I do think of Pistachio as kind of a separate entity. It doesn’t have followers. It has readers. It’s a thing.” Fitton distinguishes herself from her online persona, which she admits is filtered to show her in a positive way. She thinks of Pistachio as a “thing” that has an audience. Virtually everyone I interviewed was strategic about using social media to reveal or conceal certain aspects of themselves. Owen Thomas, a former Valleywag editor, explained, “With social media, we have a sense of the tools to craft those identities. It’s almost like when previous programmers had to write in assembly language. And now we got Visual Basic for constructing identities.” Profile pictures, likes and dislikes, and subjects chosen to tweet or blog about are calculated to give off a certain impression.

Alice E. Marwick, Status Update, loc. 278