INFLUENCER’S SYMBOLIC REPRESENTATION OF NARCISSISM IN TIKTOK AND INSTAGRAM

Brenda Lee, Nyarwi Ahmad, M.Si, Ph.D.; Mufti Nurlatifah, S.I.P, M.A.; Syaifa Tania, S.I.P., M.A.

2024 | Tesis | S2 Ilmu Komunikasi

In this day and age, social media is used more than ever. This study investigates symbolic representation of narcissism through TikTok and Instagram, by Victoria Paris, Suede Brooks, Dom Kade, Fuji, Aaliyah Massaid, and Emil Mario, influencers, to study their posts. It will help define the symbolic narcissism. It is important to understand how influencers behave and what their behavior represents on social media because they are being displayed to millions of followers. This is qualitative research with content analysis approach for collecting and analyzing the data from the different subjects TikTok and Instagram pages , owned by ByteDance and Meta Platforms respectively. This research was conducted by analyzing posts based on 3 concepts: pursuit of wealth, pursuit of status and, self-promotion, which displays a strong sense of entitlement. The findings show that the subjects display symbolically narcissism through different behaviors such as displayed of wealth, displayed of self-centeredness, self-presentation by e. post “a perfect day” vlogs, just post a video where the main subject is them. The main conclusion from the research is that influencers from similar content genres overlap between each other, despite them being from different countries. Gender impacts in an evident manner the way they post despite being from similar life-style type influencers. There are countless factors that affect how influencers represent concepts such as the focus of this thesis symbolic narcissism. Such this topic should be further studied.

In this day and age, social media is used more than ever. This study investigates symbolic representation of narcissism through   TikTok and Instagram, by Victoria Paris, Suede Brooks, Dom Kade, Fuji, Aaliyah Massaid, and Emil Mario, influencers, to study their posts. It will help define the symbolic narcissism  . It is important to understand such how influencers behave and what their behaviour represent on social media   because they are being displayed to millions of followers. This is qualitative research with content analysis approach for collecting and analysing the data from the different subjects TikTok and Instagram pages  , owned by ByteDance and Meta Platforms respectively. This research was conducted by analysing posts based on 3 concepts:   pursuit of wealth, pursuit of status and, self-promotion, which displays a strong sense of entitlement. The findings show that the subjects display symbolically narcissism   through different behaviours like displayed of wealth, displayed of self-centeredness, self-presentation by e. posting “a perfect day” vlogs, just posting a video where the main subject is them. The main conclusion from the research is that influencers from similar content genre overlap between each other, despite them being from different countries. Gender impacts in an evident manner the way they post despite being from similar life-style type influencer. There is myriad of factors that affect how influencers represent concepts such as the focus of this thesis symbolic narcissism. Such this topic should be further studied.

Kata Kunci : Influencer, Instagram, Narcissism, Symbolical Narcissism, TikTok.