Funding for To the Contrary provided by Coming up on To the Contrary I realize that my generation wasn't going to be interested in in receiving wisdom from experts in that same way.

I realized that they were going to look to more authentic representations of an expert.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe'.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives This week.

You may have never heard of today's woman thought leader, but you're familiar with her work.

Julia Allison is perhaps the first social media influencer before they even had a name for the job category.

She was creating content for a variety of social media platforms.

But rather than getting praise for her foresight, Allison had to defend herself against criticism and misogyny.

So, Ms. Allison, Julia Allison, welcome today.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Julia Allison, tell us what it was like to be a content creator in the beginning and how much misogyny did you run into?

I think that we're starting with this.

So I began blogging in 1999 when I was a freshman in college.

I taught myself HTML and I started talking about my life.

And at the time, that was fairly unusual.

As I made my way through college, I began a column at Georgetown where I graduated, and I was writing primarily about dating.

I wasn't thinking about it as a potential career.

I was just doing it because it was entertaining.

I liked talking to other students, and I and I mostly needed an excuse to ask them questions.

And and I liked that way of doing it.

When I graduated from college, I, I had already gotten quite a bit of attention for the column that I had there at Georgetown.

And I ended up thinking, I really want to go into journalism.

But for anyone who's tried to be a writer, it is not exactly a profession that is filled with tons of money and an easy career path.

So I realized that I needed to create a brand for myself.

And at the time when social media was just starting and this is before Instagram, this is before Twitter.

It was just Tumblr out there and people having their own blogs.

So that's what I started with.

But I utilized it in the way that many social media influencers do now, the way they do on Instagram.

So sharing snippets of my life, I was doing a lot of television at the time, so I was going on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and I would give a behind the scenes.

I would say, Here's what I'm wearing.

Here's what I'm talking about today.

This is how I prep.

This is me in the in the black town car going uptown to the studios.

All of this was a little bit unusual at the time.

And I did experience quite a bit of misogyny and it was something I wasn't prepared for at the age of 22, 23, 24, 25.

And it lasts.

I mean, it's still happening, to be honest, not just to me, but to millions of women in the media.

How is it different, if at all, to women aiming to be or being influencers these days?

I mean, you talk about the misogyny.

Tell me what happened.

Tell me if they're still getting it or if it's changed somehow or if maybe you were just too sensitive.

It was because you were a pioneer in in the occupation.

Yeah.

So first, let's unpack what the misogyny actually looks like.

So there are a couple of different elements to misogyny right now in the media, and it's not just in the media, by the way.

It's in a host of different professions.

So you see undue focus on physical appearance, analyzing a woman's appearance, objectifying her, either sending comments her way that are pejorative, criticizing her body, what her body looks like, what her face looks like in ways that you would never see with men.

You see age discrimination.

So women are told that they need to be young.

Of course, they're not taken seriously when they're young, but then when they're older, they're criticized for being older.

One of the comments I used to get a lot when I was in my twenties was You look like you're 40.

Which by the way, I'm 42.

Great.

Why is an age an appropriate thing to comment on with regard to someone who's who's trying to do their career?

And then you see you see other things like, for example, marital status critiques.

So people focus, Are you married?

Are you dating as if that's relevant to to their career?

Now, I will say I was a dating columnist, so it might have been a little bit different for me.

But the critiques generally fall along the lines of things that you would never hear if applied to a man.

So that's how that's kind of the litmus test for misogyny.

Is this the kind of thing that you would ever hear about a man, or is this something that you would never talk about?

So beyond that insinuations that you got to where you got, not because you're qualified, not because you had creative abilities, not because of your imagination, not because you were competent or you're intelligent, but because of the men in your life.

You know, your father, your partner, the person you dated.

And these can get kind of sexualized as well.

And so, you know, who did you sleep with and this sort of thing.

You don't hear that about men.

So these are the sorts of.

But.

But do women influencers still hear about it today?

I think, for example, we did a program recently about conservatives attacking Taylor Swift for Yes, because she's an unmarried woman and talks about her break ups and, you know, isn't conforming to she's 33.

She should be married with three kids.

Right.

By now, as far as some conservative commentators are concerned.

And what really struck me was I looked at some of the reactions to her on conservative social media and one man who looked kind of like Elmer Fudd having a bad hair day.

Yeah.

Called her homely.

And I just thought, where do you come off calling anybody homely?

Did you get a lot of that?

I did actually get a lot of that.

And I'll I'll first start by saying I am an enormous Taylor Swift fan.

I just want to get that out there on the public record.

I really admire her and she has actually struggled with a lot of these same critiques.

It doesn't discriminate on, you know, how big you are.

You have you have men and women to which that is internalized misogyny is is one of the most virulent strains of it.

It's it's really sad to witness that.

Why do you say it?

Describe what you mean by intelligent.

It would be like women critiquing other women utilizing misogynist tropes.

So having a woman say to another woman, you know, and this is usually online, often anonymous, although in the case of Taylor Swift, these are not anonymous comments.

They are public commentators who are critiquing a woman based upon her appearance.

When I was doing television appearances, I would regularly get negative comments on my body.

You know, if I had gained one or £2 or if you know how it is like sometimes you just don't look as good that particular day, not conforming to whatever standard this person has set for you seems to elicit a lot of rage.

And what I think is really happening here, this is projection.

So these are people who are navigating their own insecurities, their own pain, psychic pain, and they don't have a healthy place to put that psychic pain.

So they projected onto someone in the public who they have decided is violating some kind of norm.

You know, maybe, as you said, she didn't get married at the time.

They thought she should get married.

She doesn't have the body type that they want her to have.

But it's not really about the woman.

It's about what's going on internally for the person critiquing the woman.

So you're saying things really haven't improved?

Well.

No, I would I would say that there is an increased.

no, I wouldn't say that.

I would say there's a much greater awareness of the problematic nature of gendered critiques.

I think ever since the MeToo movement, even though that was primarily focused on rape and sexual assault, it also focused on harassment.

And I think that has that awareness, that consciousness has trickled down and also people have all experienced it themselves.

You know, when I first started getting a lot of nasty comments online, you know, not that many people were online putting themselves out there at that time.

There were people, of course.

But I was one of the first and a lot of people couldn't relate to it.

Now, fast forward, you know, it's 15 years later.

Everyone's gotten a nasty comment online and they understand, this actually doesn't have much to do with me.

This has a lot more to do with the person who's sending the anonymous comment who doesn't know me, who has no right to comment on my physical appearance, my age, my marital status, you know, etc.. You were criticized for being self-promotional, which to me nobody gets to be an influencer if they're not self-promotional, if they don't try to get as many clicks and followers as possible.

And to do that, you have to be controversial in whatever way you can think of.

And you have to be doing things that not everybody else is doing.

So how did you feel about that?

I went into journalism and my intention was to be a journalist.

So I was a print journalist.

And then I, I also was simultaneously to that doing television.

And so I saw social media as a way to promote my columns and to promote my TV appearances.

And I ended up doing a television show and it just seemed like a logical thing to do.

And so to be labeled with the pejorative self-promotion, again it's gendered.

You're not going to ever hear a man being criticized for being self-promotional.

What he's doing instead is being ambitious.

He's putting his career first.

He is making sure that people know about him.

And I do think that that is something that we need to be really mindful of as we encourage young women and women of all ages to put themselves out there and to say, hey, you know, here's the book that I wrote, please read it.

Here's the concert that I'm I'm playing music at, please come to it.

That's just a you know, here's the here's the clothing line that I designed.

Please buy it.

That's completely normal.

And I think what threw people is that at the time, it wasn't normal to utilize your own life to promote your your works of art or your career, unless you were an actress, a musician, something that we could kind of.

that's allowed.

So it was genre breaking that scares people.

What are you doing?

You have no right to talk about your outfits.

You're not a model.

Okay, so what?

So now it's seen as as completely normalized.

And I think that that's great.

You should be able to promote whatever you want to promote.

Now, I do believe in in, in being mindful about what you are promoting.

I was never that controversial in terms of like anything I actually did.

But just the idea of promoting your career as a young woman and not being an actress and not being a musician was strange for people.

Did you have any idea how, for lack of a better word, influential influencers were going to become and how careers have been made now by people who started on social media and got themselves onto TV or even didn't, and become major singers.

Actors, actresses, you name it.

Yeah, I did know (Laughter) you did know?

Yes, I did.

How did you know?

So I thought a lot about this when I was in my early to mid twenties.

And I looked at the media landscape and I could sense that it was shifting.

And I actually gave quite a few talks at the time about I called it the new media.

And what I saw was I had tracked that at the time.

Oprah was really big and she had a habit of knighting other experts so Oprah couldn't be an expert in all of the different arenas.

So she had different people.

Suze Orman, Doctor Phil, you know, all these different people who served as an expert in their arena.

And I realized that my generation wasn't going to be interested in in receiving wisdom from experts in that same way.

I realized that they were going to look to more authentic representations of an expert so aspirational characters who would share more authentically about their lives on social media and I did see this.

I saw it, I think, in 2006 or so and I knew that this would be big, which is why I started a company in 2007 that was designed to be a social media influencer agency, so to support the burgeoning careers of social media influencers.

However, it was too early, and even though I was probably one of the first people to get sponsorship deals, so I was sponsored by Sony, by Sysco, by T Mobile, by a host of other different brands.

None of them had programs, so there was no Amazon affiliate deals.

There was no there was nothing.

It was just like you would have to send emails and say, Hey, I I'm going to be, you know, tweeting about this or I'm going to be doing a post about this.

And they'd be like, What's a what's a tweet?

I had to explain this whole genre of of how they could get their message out.

And these were through these authentic community sessions by influencers and even what an influencer was.

So, I mean, you had to tell them in advance about your tweets.

How did that did they have to?

Did your deal include that they had to approve them?

When I first started pitching brand deals, this is like 2007, 2008.

There was no line item in the budget of any of these companies for influencer brand deals.

So I actually had to establish the category.

So I was the first influencer that Sysco ever hired to do special videos at the Consumer Electronics Show.

I was the first influencer Sony ever hired.

I was one of the first influencers T-Mobile hired, and so they didn't really know exactly what it was.

So I had to explain, you know, this is what an influencer is.

They are more authentic than your average celebrity.

So they're going to speak in different ways.

They're going to communicate through social media.

And that was not something that they were entirely comfortable with at the beginning.

They liked control and there wasn't as much control with influencers.

Again, now looking back, before we get to more of what you did as an influencer, are you proud of the field you created?

I imagine it's a mixed bag.

There are large things you are proud of and some things that have come along that you don't feel great about.

That's a great question.

I am really proud of some elements of the field of influencing and other elements I'm less proud of.

I'm proud of the authenticity when it happens.

Now, admittedly, it doesn't always happen, but I think there's more authenticity in the field of influencing than there was in the field of celebrity or even traditional media.

I'm proud of what has happened with the releasing of gatekeeping, so it was very challenging to get diverse voices into the traditional media prior to influencing.

So I'm proud of that element of it.

I think what I'm less proud of is sometimes it feels out of touch and it can feel focused on material goods and focused on consumerism and capitalism in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

And all the time there are more and more and bigger and bigger platforms.

What do you think?

How is that going to affect the influencer industry?

There was just an article in the New York Times Magazine about Taylor Swift, and she had declined to, through her representatives to in to be interviewed for this article.

And the author, who's very talented writer, asked whether that was going to be the new norm, and specifically, she said Taylor Swift has something like 290 million Instagram followers.

So what can Taylor get from The New York Times that she can't just do with no intermediary?

And I think that case study is is an indication that people are going direct.

And this is something that we have been seeing happening for the last ten years or so, But I think it's really picking up steam.

Why would I go to a journalist potentially putting myself in danger to be misunderstood?

And as someone who has had many stories written about me by journalists who were not always as careful and conscientious as I would have hoped they would be, particularly, by the way, in talking about sarcasm, I tend to be a little bit of a sarcastic person, and I have had things written about me in publications where that were.

I had said to the I had said to the reporter with clearly sarcastic, and then they were misrepresented as something I said with no sarcasm.

So that's the kind of thing that can happen to celebrities.

And they're saying, you know what?

No, thank you.

I don't need the traditional media any more.

I can go directly through social media and tell my audience about my concert film, tell my audience about my merchandise line, tell my audience about that.

So that's happening and that's something that's been happening for a while.

And then I think what else is happening is you have this, as I was saying earlier, this an increased diversity of voices.

And we throw around the word diversity all the time.

What does that really mean?

It means people who have literally never been honored by the traditional news media with the opportunity to be interviewed because they don't fall into the traditional news media, you know, rubric of what makes that person newsworthy.

And those people now have voices.

And what happens when more people are getting their news from TikTok than from The New York Times.

And we can say, my God, that's terrible.

And I think there are some issues with that.

And what I'd like to see with influencers and this is something that Harvard has a center called the Shorenstein Center, which is fantastic.

It's their media center here, and they're actually working on this.

How can we have influencers start to learn some of the skills that journalists know how to fact check, how to tell a story, how to separate information from disinformation, Because influencers have a lot of power right now.

A lot of people are looking at them.

They're not always looking at other places.

How can they utilize this power with responsibility?

And so that's what I'm really interested in right now in that everyone needs to do this.

You know, some people, they're just going to be doing the humor and that's wonderful.

They're going to be doing the dance videos.

That's wonderful.

But for the others who are more interested in social justice in in a country and in a society that is informed, that is educated, how can they be a part of that education?

So, Julia, you're in grad school.

Tell our audience about what you're doing.

Yes.

So I decided to go back to school at the age of 42, which I highly recommend if you want to pay to work.

And I, I believe very strongly in social justice.

I'm particularly interested in environmental issues, women's issues and animal rights issues.

And I decided to apply to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

I'm getting my master's there, and I'm particularly focused on ethics and gender issues and and social movements.

So it's been an incredible opportunity to take a lot of what I've done in the real world and learn the underlying theory of what the best academics are thinking about that.

And then hopefully I'll be able to take what I'm learning at Harvard and translate it into the real world to support non-profits and organizations that are doing good in the world and entrepreneurs that want to make a difference with their narrative strategy and hopefully making this world just a little bit better.

- You've mentioned reaching out to diverse people.

And one question before we're out of time, which is do you reach out to young people and old people in different ways?

And you mentioned ageism, even about yourself at the age of 42.

Yeah.

Do you think that a lot of the the public feeling against President Biden is based on his age?

And is that ageism?

I feel that we have a society that is quite age segregated, like perhaps more so than other societies.

And I think to our detriment, I notice how often I am surrounded in or I have been in the past, surrounded by people all roughly the same age.

And we had an event here at my home, which we called the Bohemian Embassy, kind of jokingly, but kind of not where we had people from the age of 16 all the way through 85.

And there was something that was really beautiful about that.

And I think anyone who's had that experience of having every decade represented and having a real we had facilitated conversations with every decade represented and the kind of wisdom and insight that you can have when you do have the opportunity to have.

We had sophomores from Harvard talking with an 85 year old who has been living here in Cambridge for the last 50 years, and one is one of the most famous architects in the world.

And how can we actually connect with each other instead of saying, you're too old, you're too young, you're you know, you're this year that like, how can we create a conversation with diverse voices, with different perspectives, different worldviews, different insights?

That's that's not just a civil conversation, but an open hearted conversation filled with compassion, empathy.

And sometimes this is easier said than done, but if we can continue to remind ourselves and if we can have influencers continue to remind us, here's how we can have a loving conversation about really tough things because we have we have a world that is filled.

I don't need to tell you this filled with a lot of hatred, a lot of violence, a lot of lack of empathy.

And the only way and a.

Lot of stereotypes.

And a lot of stereotypes that are that are violent, not helping anyone.

No one is winning here.

Not even not even people who are not even white men.

No one is winning in the patriarchy in this society that is is rife with hatred.

No one.

So let's do something else.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for your wisdom, for your time and for what you do and continue to do.

That's it for this edition.

And keep the conversation going on all our social media platforms.

And please visit our website, pbs.org.

Slash to the contrary.

And whether you agree or think to the contrary.

See you next time.

See you next time.

(MUSIC) Funding for To the Contrary provided by You're watching PBS Funding for To the Contrary provided by Coming up on To the Contrary I realize that my generation wasn't going to be interested in in receiving wisdom from experts in that same way.

I realized that they were going to look to more authentic representations of an expert.

(MUSIC) Hello, I'm Bonnie Erbe'.

Welcome to To the Contrary, a weekly discussion of news and social trends from diverse perspectives This week.

You may have never heard of today's woman thought leader, but you're familiar with her work.

Julia Allison is perhaps the first social media influencer before they even had a name for the job category.

She was creating content for a variety of social media platforms.

But rather than getting praise for her foresight, Allison had to defend herself against criticism and misogyny.

So, Ms. Allison, Julia Allison, welcome today.

Thank you for joining us.

Thanks for having me.

Julia Allison, tell us what it was like to be a content creator in the beginning and how much misogyny did you run into?

I think that we're starting with this.

So I began blogging in 1999 when I was a freshman in college.

I taught myself HTML and I started talking about my life.

And at the time, that was fairly unusual.

As I made my way through college, I began a column at Georgetown where I graduated, and I was writing primarily about dating.

I wasn't thinking about it as a potential career.

I was just doing it because it was entertaining.

I liked talking to other students, and I and I mostly needed an excuse to ask them questions.

And and I liked that way of doing it.

When I graduated from college, I, I had already gotten quite a bit of attention for the column that I had there at Georgetown.

And I ended up thinking, I really want to go into journalism.

But for anyone who's tried to be a writer, it is not exactly a profession that is filled with tons of money and an easy career path.

So I realized that I needed to create a brand for myself.

And at the time when social media was just starting and this is before Instagram, this is before Twitter.

It was just Tumblr out there and people having their own blogs.

So that's what I started with.

But I utilized it in the way that many social media influencers do now, the way they do on Instagram.

So sharing snippets of my life, I was doing a lot of television at the time, so I was going on CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and I would give a behind the scenes.

I would say, Here's what I'm wearing.

Here's what I'm talking about today.

This is how I prep.

This is me in the in the black town car going uptown to the studios.

All of this was a little bit unusual at the time.

And I did experience quite a bit of misogyny and it was something I wasn't prepared for at the age of 22, 23, 24, 25.

And it lasts.

I mean, it's still happening, to be honest, not just to me, but to millions of women in the media.

How is it different, if at all, to women aiming to be or being influencers these days?

I mean, you talk about the misogyny.

Tell me what happened.

Tell me if they're still getting it or if it's changed somehow or if maybe you were just too sensitive.

It was because you were a pioneer in in the occupation.

Yeah.

So first, let's unpack what the misogyny actually looks like.

So there are a couple of different elements to misogyny right now in the media, and it's not just in the media, by the way.

It's in a host of different professions.

So you see undue focus on physical appearance, analyzing a woman's appearance, objectifying her, either sending comments her way that are pejorative, criticizing her body, what her body looks like, what her face looks like in ways that you would never see with men.

You see age discrimination.

So women are told that they need to be young.

Of course, they're not taken seriously when they're young, but then when they're older, they're criticized for being older.

One of the comments I used to get a lot when I was in my twenties was You look like you're 40.

Which by the way, I'm 42.

Great.

Why is an age an appropriate thing to comment on with regard to someone who's who's trying to do their career?

And then you see you see other things like, for example, marital status critiques.

So people focus, Are you married?

Are you dating as if that's relevant to to their career?

Now, I will say I was a dating columnist, so it might have been a little bit different for me.

But the critiques generally fall along the lines of things that you would never hear if applied to a man.

So that's how that's kind of the litmus test for misogyny.

Is this the kind of thing that you would ever hear about a man, or is this something that you would never talk about?

So beyond that insinuations that you got to where you got, not because you're qualified, not because you had creative abilities, not because of your imagination, not because you were competent or you're intelligent, but because of the men in your life.

You know, your father, your partner, the person you dated.

And these can get kind of sexualized as well.

And so, you know, who did you sleep with and this sort of thing.

You don't hear that about men.

So these are the sorts of.

But.

But do women influencers still hear about it today?

I think, for example, we did a program recently about conservatives attacking Taylor Swift for Yes, because she's an unmarried woman and talks about her break ups and, you know, isn't conforming to she's 33.

She should be married with three kids.

Right.

By now, as far as some conservative commentators are concerned.

And what really struck me was I looked at some of the reactions to her on conservative social media and one man who looked kind of like Elmer Fudd having a bad hair day.

Yeah.

Called her homely.

And I just thought, where do you come off calling anybody homely?

Did you get a lot of that?

I did actually get a lot of that.

And I'll I'll first start by saying I am an enormous Taylor Swift fan.

I just want to get that out there on the public record.

I really admire her and she has actually struggled with a lot of these same critiques.

It doesn't discriminate on, you know, how big you are.

You have you have men and women to which that is internalized misogyny is is one of the most virulent strains of it.

It's it's really sad to witness that.

Why do you say it?

Describe what you mean by intelligent.

It would be like women critiquing other women utilizing misogynist tropes.

So having a woman say to another woman, you know, and this is usually online, often anonymous, although in the case of Taylor Swift, these are not anonymous comments.

They are public commentators who are critiquing a woman based upon her appearance.

When I was doing television appearances, I would regularly get negative comments on my body.

You know, if I had gained one or £2 or if you know how it is like sometimes you just don't look as good that particular day, not conforming to whatever standard this person has set for you seems to elicit a lot of rage.

And what I think is really happening here, this is projection.

So these are people who are navigating their own insecurities, their own pain, psychic pain, and they don't have a healthy place to put that psychic pain.

So they projected onto someone in the public who they have decided is violating some kind of norm.

You know, maybe, as you said, she didn't get married at the time.

They thought she should get married.

She doesn't have the body type that they want her to have.

But it's not really about the woman.

It's about what's going on internally for the person critiquing the woman.

So you're saying things really haven't improved?

Well.

No, I would I would say that there is an increased.

no, I wouldn't say that.

I would say there's a much greater awareness of the problematic nature of gendered critiques.

I think ever since the MeToo movement, even though that was primarily focused on rape and sexual assault, it also focused on harassment.

And I think that has that awareness, that consciousness has trickled down and also people have all experienced it themselves.

You know, when I first started getting a lot of nasty comments online, you know, not that many people were online putting themselves out there at that time.

There were people, of course.

But I was one of the first and a lot of people couldn't relate to it.

Now, fast forward, you know, it's 15 years later.

Everyone's gotten a nasty comment online and they understand, this actually doesn't have much to do with me.

This has a lot more to do with the person who's sending the anonymous comment who doesn't know me, who has no right to comment on my physical appearance, my age, my marital status, you know, etc.. You were criticized for being self-promotional, which to me nobody gets to be an influencer if they're not self-promotional, if they don't try to get as many clicks and followers as possible.

And to do that, you have to be controversial in whatever way you can think of.

And you have to be doing things that not everybody else is doing.

So how did you feel about that?

I went into journalism and my intention was to be a journalist.

So I was a print journalist.

And then I, I also was simultaneously to that doing television.

And so I saw social media as a way to promote my columns and to promote my TV appearances.

And I ended up doing a television show and it just seemed like a logical thing to do.

And so to be labeled with the pejorative self-promotion, again it's gendered.

You're not going to ever hear a man being criticized for being self-promotional.

What he's doing instead is being ambitious.

He's putting his career first.

He is making sure that people know about him.

And I do think that that is something that we need to be really mindful of as we encourage young women and women of all ages to put themselves out there and to say, hey, you know, here's the book that I wrote, please read it.

Here's the concert that I'm I'm playing music at, please come to it.

That's just a you know, here's the here's the clothing line that I designed.

Please buy it.

That's completely normal.

And I think what threw people is that at the time, it wasn't normal to utilize your own life to promote your your works of art or your career, unless you were an actress, a musician, something that we could kind of.

that's allowed.

So it was genre breaking that scares people.

What are you doing?

You have no right to talk about your outfits.

You're not a model.

Okay, so what?

So now it's seen as as completely normalized.

And I think that that's great.

You should be able to promote whatever you want to promote.

Now, I do believe in in, in being mindful about what you are promoting.

I was never that controversial in terms of like anything I actually did.

But just the idea of promoting your career as a young woman and not being an actress and not being a musician was strange for people.

Did you have any idea how, for lack of a better word, influential influencers were going to become and how careers have been made now by people who started on social media and got themselves onto TV or even didn't, and become major singers.

Actors, actresses, you name it.

Yeah, I did know (Laughter) you did know?

Yes, I did.

How did you know?

So I thought a lot about this when I was in my early to mid twenties.

And I looked at the media landscape and I could sense that it was shifting.

And I actually gave quite a few talks at the time about I called it the new media.

And what I saw was I had tracked that at the time.

Oprah was really big and she had a habit of knighting other experts so Oprah couldn't be an expert in all of the different arenas.

So she had different people.

Suze Orman, Doctor Phil, you know, all these different people who served as an expert in their arena.

And I realized that my generation wasn't going to be interested in in receiving wisdom from experts in that same way.

I realized that they were going to look to more authentic representations of an expert so aspirational characters who would share more authentically about their lives on social media and I did see this.

I saw it, I think, in 2006 or so and I knew that this would be big, which is why I started a company in 2007 that was designed to be a social media influencer agency, so to support the burgeoning careers of social media influencers.

However, it was too early, and even though I was probably one of the first people to get sponsorship deals, so I was sponsored by Sony, by Sysco, by T Mobile, by a host of other different brands.

None of them had programs, so there was no Amazon affiliate deals.

There was no there was nothing.

It was just like you would have to send emails and say, Hey, I I'm going to be, you know, tweeting about this or I'm going to be doing a post about this.

And they'd be like, What's a what's a tweet?

I had to explain this whole genre of of how they could get their message out.

And these were through these authentic community sessions by influencers and even what an influencer was.

So, I mean, you had to tell them in advance about your tweets.

How did that did they have to?

Did your deal include that they had to approve them?

When I first started pitching brand deals, this is like 2007, 2008.

There was no line item in the budget of any of these companies for influencer brand deals.

So I actually had to establish the category.

So I was the first influencer that Sysco ever hired to do special videos at the Consumer Electronics Show.

I was the first influencer Sony ever hired.

I was one of the first influencers T-Mobile hired, and so they didn't really know exactly what it was.

So I had to explain, you know, this is what an influencer is.

They are more authentic than your average celebrity.

So they're going to speak in different ways.

They're going to communicate through social media.

And that was not something that they were entirely comfortable with at the beginning.

They liked control and there wasn't as much control with influencers.

Again, now looking back, before we get to more of what you did as an influencer, are you proud of the field you created?

I imagine it's a mixed bag.

There are large things you are proud of and some things that have come along that you don't feel great about.

That's a great question.

I am really proud of some elements of the field of influencing and other elements I'm less proud of.

I'm proud of the authenticity when it happens.

Now, admittedly, it doesn't always happen, but I think there's more authenticity in the field of influencing than there was in the field of celebrity or even traditional media.

I'm proud of what has happened with the releasing of gatekeeping, so it was very challenging to get diverse voices into the traditional media prior to influencing.

So I'm proud of that element of it.

I think what I'm less proud of is sometimes it feels out of touch and it can feel focused on material goods and focused on consumerism and capitalism in a way that makes me uncomfortable.

And all the time there are more and more and bigger and bigger platforms.

What do you think?

How is that going to affect the influencer industry?

There was just an article in the New York Times Magazine about Taylor Swift, and she had declined to, through her representatives to in to be interviewed for this article.

And the author, who's very talented writer, asked whether that was going to be the new norm, and specifically, she said Taylor Swift has something like 290 million Instagram followers.

So what can Taylor get from The New York Times that she can't just do with no intermediary?

And I think that case study is is an indication that people are going direct.

And this is something that we have been seeing happening for the last ten years or so, But I think it's really picking up steam.

Why would I go to a journalist potentially putting myself in danger to be misunderstood?

And as someone who has had many stories written about me by journalists who were not always as careful and conscientious as I would have hoped they would be, particularly, by the way, in talking about sarcasm, I tend to be a little bit of a sarcastic person, and I have had things written about me in publications where that were.

I had said to the I had said to the reporter with clearly sarcastic, and then they were misrepresented as something I said with no sarcasm.

So that's the kind of thing that can happen to celebrities.

And they're saying, you know what?

No, thank you.

I don't need the traditional media any more.

I can go directly through social media and tell my audience about my concert film, tell my audience about my merchandise line, tell my audience about that.

So that's happening and that's something that's been happening for a while.

And then I think what else is happening is you have this, as I was saying earlier, this an increased diversity of voices.

And we throw around the word diversity all the time.

What does that really mean?

It means people who have literally never been honored by the traditional news media with the opportunity to be interviewed because they don't fall into the traditional news media, you know, rubric of what makes that person newsworthy.

And those people now have voices.

And what happens when more people are getting their news from TikTok than from The New York Times.

And we can say, my God, that's terrible.

And I think there are some issues with that.

And what I'd like to see with influencers and this is something that Harvard has a center called the Shorenstein Center, which is fantastic.

It's their media center here, and they're actually working on this.

How can we have influencers start to learn some of the skills that journalists know how to fact check, how to tell a story, how to separate information from disinformation, Because influencers have a lot of power right now.

A lot of people are looking at them.

They're not always looking at other places.

How can they utilize this power with responsibility?

And so that's what I'm really interested in right now in that everyone needs to do this.

You know, some people, they're just going to be doing the humor and that's wonderful.

They're going to be doing the dance videos.

That's wonderful.

But for the others who are more interested in social justice in in a country and in a society that is informed, that is educated, how can they be a part of that education?

So, Julia, you're in grad school.

Tell our audience about what you're doing.

Yes.

So I decided to go back to school at the age of 42, which I highly recommend if you want to pay to work.

And I, I believe very strongly in social justice.

I'm particularly interested in environmental issues, women's issues and animal rights issues.

And I decided to apply to Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

I'm getting my master's there, and I'm particularly focused on ethics and gender issues and and social movements.

So it's been an incredible opportunity to take a lot of what I've done in the real world and learn the underlying theory of what the best academics are thinking about that.

And then hopefully I'll be able to take what I'm learning at Harvard and translate it into the real world to support non-profits and organizations that are doing good in the world and entrepreneurs that want to make a difference with their narrative strategy and hopefully making this world just a little bit better.

- You've mentioned reaching out to diverse people.

And one question before we're out of time, which is do you reach out to young people and old people in different ways?

And you mentioned ageism, even about yourself at the age of 42.

Yeah.

Do you think that a lot of the the public feeling against President Biden is based on his age?

And is that ageism?

I feel that we have a society that is quite age segregated, like perhaps more so than other societies.

And I think to our detriment, I notice how often I am surrounded in or I have been in the past, surrounded by people all roughly the same age.

And we had an event here at my home, which we called the Bohemian Embassy, kind of jokingly, but kind of not where we had people from the age of 16 all the way through 85.

And there was something that was really beautiful about that.

And I think anyone who's had that experience of having every decade represented and having a real we had facilitated conversations with every decade represented and the kind of wisdom and insight that you can have when you do have the opportunity to have.

We had sophomores from Harvard talking with an 85 year old who has been living here in Cambridge for the last 50 years, and one is one of the most famous architects in the world.

And how can we actually connect with each other instead of saying, you're too old, you're too young, you're you know, you're this year that like, how can we create a conversation with diverse voices, with different perspectives, different worldviews, different insights?

That's that's not just a civil conversation, but an open hearted conversation filled with compassion, empathy.

And sometimes this is easier said than done, but if we can continue to remind ourselves and if we can have influencers continue to remind us, here's how we can have a loving conversation about really tough things because we have we have a world that is filled.

I don't need to tell you this filled with a lot of hatred, a lot of violence, a lot of lack of empathy.

And the only way and a.

Lot of stereotypes.

And a lot of stereotypes that are that are violent, not helping anyone.

No one is winning here.

Not even not even people who are not even white men.

No one is winning in the patriarchy in this society that is is rife with hatred.

No one.

So let's do something else.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for your wisdom, for your time and for what you do and continue to do.

That's it for this edition.

And keep the conversation going on all our social media platforms.

And please visit our website, pbs.org.

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