Influencers "Destructive Intrusion" between Civil Spheres

 

“We all have the same 24 hours in a day.” “You're given one life and it's down to you what you do with it," she said. "Like you can literally go in any direction.” 

Sophie Homlar

Pictured above is reality television star and recent entrepreneur, Molly-Mae Hauge. If anyone binged watched season five of Love Island UK, you know that Molly Mae has gained momentous economic success over the last couple of years– getting multiple brand deals through her social media platform and influencer status.  

While the statement made above (made via social media) is a blatant disregard for the privilege and resources that Molly Mae has had access to fuel her success, it can also be seen as a contradiction among the civil and noncivil spheres of society. In Jeffery Alexander's writing on The Civil Sphere, he describes the “civil sphere” as “a sphere or subsystem of society that is analytically and, to various degrees, empirically separated from the spheres of political, economic, family, and religious life” (Alexander 2006: 53). While these spheres operate in primarily productive ways by generating solidarity among members of the civil society, a functional contradiction known as “destructive intrusion” describes one danger of the overlapping of spheres. Through the generation of “cultural codes” broadcasted through media, those who gain power through the economic sphere have the ability to characterize those in the civil sphere broadly negatively or positively. Alexander describes this process by stating “...the actualization of this potential is challenged, and often blocked, by spheres abutting civil society that have radically different functional concerns and operate according to contradictory goals, employ different kinds of media, and produce social relations of an altogether different sort” (Alexander 2006: 203). 

Molly-Mae’s economic privilege gains her a lot of success, power, and recognition in civil society and allows her to make these claims. However, her words distort the reality of her economic success and “pollutes and degrades economic failure,” by labeling a lack of economic success as incompetent or lazy (Alexander 2006: 207). Looking at Molly’s statement sociologically grasps the often negative impact that advantages in the economic sphere have on civil society– dividing instead of uniting members of society.

https://moodle.kenyon.edu/pluginfile.php/333182/mod_resource/content/0/Alexander%20-%20The%20Civil%20Sphere%20ch%204%20and%208.pdf

https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/reports/a38695152/molly-mae-24-hours-in-a-day/