How do Influencers proceed, that their everyday life is interesting for millions of people? How can they earn profit with their posts? And how can you explain the successful reproduction of stereotypical images of femininity?

The use of social media is indispensable from today’s life. We receive impressions of different lifestyles multiply and with them, the possibility and inspirations for our own life orientation and creation rises.

Acceptance and Popularity of Influencers are not longer tied to special skills or talents. A community of several million followers can be generated simply by sharing everyday content. The phenomenon of influencers is particularly prominent on the Instagram platform because the focus lies on self- presentation with photo postings. It is particularly suitable for investigating identity staging and capitalization of influencers.With the help of Pierre Bourdieu‘s capital theory it can be explained how this capitalisation of self presenting works. Furthermore, his habitus theory offers an explanation why women orientate themselves to stereotypical images of femininity when presenting themselves. Women mostly post articles on household topics, fashion and make-up instructions. Just like the reproduction of traditional images of femininity, the posing and gaze behavior of many successful influencers is consistent.

We assume that the young people are Instagram and therefore also smartphone savvy. That is why we created a smartphone game. In this way, we want to make the world of influencers tangible for young people and at the same time encourage them to question the self-portrayal of influencers.

The content of the game is to take the role of an instagram influencer. Players imitate the facial expressions and pose behaviour. The more patterns players copy correctly the more attention and interactions they gain. As the playing time rises, the frequency of the poses to be imitated increases, so it becomes more difficult to keep up. In the course of the game you have the opportunity to move up or down from nano to mega influencer and accordingly to make more or less profit. Successes and losses can be viewed in a profile overview, comparable to the profile overview on Instagram accounts. The game relies on the idea that with more success the pressure to meet the demands of followers also increases. This is intended to encourage players to question the perfect self-presentation of successful influencers in a playful way and explore individual ways of self-presentation.