Why Influencers and Celebrities Act Strange and Why Likeability Is Losing Ground to Attention.
Human attention is a scarce economic resource that media and platforms compete for, and this scarcity reshapes how TV, social media, influencers and celebrities behave to capture it. The competition for attention incentivizes increasingly optimized, novel and often antagonistic performance strategies that can look strange compared with older norms of celebrity likeability and decorum.
Attention as currency
As Herbert Simon argued in his classic essay on information abundance, when information grows, attention becomes the true bottleneck (Simon, 1971). Herbert Simon’s point is that in a world where information keeps expanding, the real limit isn’t how much content can be produced but how much people can actually process. Human attention is finite. We only have so many hours in the day and so much cognitive energy to spend. So when information grows without limit, attention becomes the “bottleneck”; the scarce resource everyone is competing for. This is why platforms, creators, and advertisers design their strategies around grabbing and holding attention, not just producing more information.
In the attention economy, attention functions like a form of capital: those who command it gain cultural, social, and economic returns, which drives constant attempts to maximize engagement signals (views, likes, shares). Platforms and creators treat content production as an optimization problem, designing signals that reliably spark rapid bursts of user attention and feed algorithmic amplification.
TV versus social media: different economies of attention
Broadcast TV historically concentrated attention in time and across mass audiences, producing a star system where likeability and broad appeal were reliable assets for long-term careers. By contrast, social media fragments attention into algorithmic feeds and micro-moments, rewarding novelty, polarizing signals and content engineered for rapid consumption rather than steady, general-audience likeability.
Where TV rewarded durable reputations and repeat appointment viewing, platform algorithms reward content that maximizes immediate engagement metrics, even if that means surprise, conflict, or spectacle.
However, today television is rapidly adopting many social-media practices to capture fragmented attention. Connected TV and streaming platforms blur broadcast and platform logics by optimizing for clip discovery, cross-posting highlights to TikTok/YouTube and hiring dedicated clippers and social teams to engineer viral moments that drive discovery and subscriptions. As a result, success metrics shift from aggregate ratings and broad likeability toward immediate engagement signals (shares, comments, clip views) and repeatable attention loops, incentivizing spectacle, polarization, and tightly branded moments that travel across platforms. This mix is turning television into an attention-optimized medium, built to be seen in algorithms and quick moments of attention. It pushes TV away from steady, broad likeability and toward short, measurable bursts of visibility.
Why influencers and celebrities make “strange” moves
a) Algorithmic incentives encourage escalation and specialization
Algorithms privilege content that is novel, polarizing, or highly shareable, so creators escalate toward ever more conspicuous signals (niching further, staging stunts, or courting controversy to trigger engagement loops). This hyper-specialization and pursuit of micro-engagement often looks irrational outside platform logic but is rational inside the optimization problem of attention capture.
b) The economics of branding and persona industrialization
Many influencers commercialize their persona intentionally, converting attention into income via sponsorships, merch, or platform monetization, which normalizes self-commodification and continual reinvention to hold attention. To keep a brand alive, creators need to produce content constantly. This often means mixing private and public life, working as if they are always on and taking risks to avoid fading quickly.
c) Spectacle, transgression, and “going viral” as a business tactic
Deliberate transgression (stunts, provocative posts, antagonistic “villain era” moves) function as attention accelerants because they create strong affective reactions and are algorithmically rewarded with reach. These strategies trade long-term likeability for short-term visibility, because platforms monetize spikes in attention more directly than steady, moderately popular content.
The changing value of likeability
Traditionally, likeability (warmth, relatability, reputational steadiness) was a reliable path to sustained cultural capital in TV and legacy media. In platform environments, however, likeability competes with other attention-signaling traits (shock, niche mastery, antagonism), and the marginal return on likeability falls as algorithms privilege other engagement drivers. Consequently, creators sometimes consciously sacrifice universal likeability in favor of polarizing or highly differentiated personas that deliver stronger short-term attention returns.
Gendered, sexualized and reactive dynamics
Social media intensifies sexualization and self-objectification incentives, producing feedback loops where enjoyment of sexualization and posting behavior correlate with how permissive users perceive sexualized content to be. This environment also amplifies gendered interactions, where offensive male gaze comments provoke aggressive female counter-gazes, and both dynamics generate attention through conflict rather than consensus or mutual likeability. Gossip culture and hyper-scrutiny further pressure public figures to respond with conspicuous signaling (image management, cosmetic narratives, performative authenticity), which can look erratic when interpreted outside the attention economy logic.
Consequences: burnout, reputational fragility and saturation
The race for attention increases emotional labor and “presence bleed” as creators blur work and life to feed continual content cycles, contributing to burnout and mental-health costs for creators. At the same time, audiences face attention saturation: more content chasing attention means lower per-item engagement, eroding the effectiveness of likeability-based influence and producing “authenticity fatigue” among consumers. Platforms and creators thus experience diminishing returns where outrage or spectacle must escalate to produce comparable attention, leading to reputational fragility and episodic moral panics rather than stable cultural authority.
What this means for audiences, creators and platforms
For audiences: Understand that much of the “strange” or polarizing behavior you see is shaped by platform rules and algorithms, not just by someone’s personality.
For creators: Try to balance quick wins for attention with building a long-term reputation. Using too much controversy may bring short bursts of reach but can damage career stability and personal well-being.
For platforms: Right now, they reward volatility and spikes. If they measured and valued steady, meaningful engagement instead, they could support likeability and quality over spectacle.
The attention economy reframes media behavior: where TV once rewarded durable likeability, social media rewards signals that maximize immediate, measurable engagement, which explains many of the “strange” moves by influencers and celebrities today. If stakeholders (platforms, creators, and audiences) want to restore the cultural value of likeability, they must change the reward structures that make outrage and spectacle the fastest path to attention, or accept that attention will continue to drive performance toward novelty, polarity, and optimization-driven risk.
If you want to strike the right balance between capturing attention and sustaining likeability, trust your public image to Upper Comms.
