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INTRODUCTION o> Is Samuel Beckett an influencer? It depends on the year in which the question is asked. In 2018, Oxford Dictionaries added a new sense of the word “influencer” to its official lexicon: “a person with the ability to influence potential buyers of a product or service by promoting or recommending the items on social media.” As Rebecca Juganaru notes, the recent explosion of use of this word (which has doubled since 2012, according to the Oxford corpus) is mostly attributable to this expanded usage, although the word’s historical meaning — “a person or thing that influences another” — dates to 1660. The divergence between the word’s prior usage and its contemporary shift is interesting partly because of the question of agency: in the older and more general definition, all the activity can be on the part of the person receiving influence, rather than on the person wielding it. Beckett, for example, can be an “influencer” in the world theatre without intending to be; the mere fact of his writing, directing, and composing has changed the face of the theatre (and many other media besides) because artists are aware of, and altered by, his contributions. Without any attempted action beyond his own obedience to creative impulses, Beckett is now available as part of the vast cultural inheritance of the twentieth century to influence today’s artists, just as Democritus, Dante, and Descartes were available to him. Conversely, in the mediated spaces of digital culture where the new definition of “influencer” holds sway, all the power and urgency rests with the person “with the ability” to influence. Amusing as it is to think of Beckett on Instagram, offering fashion tips (“the Modernist,” as Dublin’s Brown Thomas department store catalogue called his look) or pithy reflections on life with an adjacent skull emoji, there is something horrifying in the idea of Beckett attempting to influence anyone, especially in the name of a product or service (even failure, for which he has regrettably become something of a poster-boy). As Harold Pinter wrote of Beckett to a friend in 1954: “He’s not selling anything I don’t ! Rebecca Juganaru: The Increasing Influence of the Word “Influencer,” Oxford Dictionaries Blog, https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2018/05/09/the-increasing-influence-of-the-wordinfluencer/ (accessed 30 April 2019). +13 +
