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Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study
Abstract
p>In the last issue’s editorial, “Five Dimensions of Online Persona” (Moore, Barbour and Lee 2017), we turned our attention to the proliferation of public identities through online platforms, and traced key nodes of research that inform how we think about and theorise online personas. We also proposed and outlined five primary dimensions to the online persona that we characterised as public, mediatised, performative, collective, and having intentional value. The scope of that work was deliberately broad and far-reaching—we envisioned that piece as neither tool nor template but, we hoped, a conceptual starting point for further thinking and research.
In this editorial we seek to continue that work by putting these theoretical foundations and concepts into practice through a study of the persona work of Instagram. This work constitutes, in many cases, significant labour: decisions are made and remade around sharing different types of images, along with the use of hashtags, framing, timing, filters, captions, or tags. Abidin (2016, p. 90) describes this as “visibility labour”, which is “the work individuals do when they self-posture and curate their self-presentations so as to be noticeable and positively prominent” to their audiences or micro-publics, and notes that the labour itself becomes invisible in the persona creation process. This distributed visibility labour forms the basis of persona work, where users and their micro-publics, in conjunction with the platform and the algorithms that drive it, are continually iterating on the persona that is produced. </p
... ). Recent studies on travel selfies have used Instagram(Barbour, Lee, & Moore, 2017;Masip et al., 2018;Wijesinghe, Mura, & Tavakoli, 2020), arguing that it simplifies data collection and provides more information for similar studies than other social networks(Rokka & Canniford, 2016).A list of 24 hashtags with the names of the top 10 most visited places in Barcelona were used to gather data. According to the 2019 Annual Tourism Report (Observatori del Turisme a Barcelona, 2020) the top attractions are Sagrada Familia, Park Güell, FC Museum Barcelona, Aquarium, The Born Cultural Centre, Spanish Town, La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Barcelona Zoo, and Picasso Museum Barcelona(Table 1). ...
... According to the 2019 Annual Tourism Report (Observatori del Turisme a Barcelona, 2020) the top attractions are Sagrada Familia, Park Güell, FC Museum Barcelona, Aquarium, The Born Cultural Centre, Spanish Town, La Pedrera, Casa Batlló, Barcelona Zoo, and Picasso Museum Barcelona(Table 1). Following previous studies(Barbour, et al. 2017;Masip et al., 2018), the Websta Instagram Analytics platform was used to gather information from Instagram. This platform allows getting access to the pictures shared in Instagram by date of publication. ...
... Snapshot-style images often feature pets, family members and children within the home. It is unsurprising that a majority of images in the data set are snapshot style, given that the bulk of Instagram users are not trained professionals and are taking and uploading images using smartphones (Barbour et al., 2017); indeed the vast majority of the more than one billion active users of Instagram (Statista, 2019) are everyday users rather than professional or even hobby photographers, so it makes sense that this data set would heavily represent this cohort. As noted by Manovich (2016) 'the majority of Instagram publicly shared images show moments in the "ordinary" lives of hundreds of millions of people using the network globally' (p. ...
... For example, one user who uploaded an image of a kitten captioned the photograph anthropomorphically, with the kitten cutely promising to have behaved itself while she was out of the house. This mirrors Barbour's earlier findings related to images of pets who were photographed watching television (Barbour et al., 2017), as well as the popular belief that cats dominate the Internet (Eppink in Kingson, 2015). There is also a connection between the traditionalist 'home sweet home' idiom, with its history in needlework samplers and other forms of feminised domesticity, and pets as companion-possessions that are usually soft, fluffy and pleasant to be around; both represent comfortable domestic life. ...
The term ‘home’ can mean many things. Indeed, the contested nature of the term has caused some scholars simply to dismiss it as useless. However, homes have an undeniable importance to our sense of self. They link us to current or past geographic locations that indicate national or cultural identities, allow us to display our taste and interests through consumer activity, and are places where we engage in leisure activities. Increasingly, we share the images we take in and of our homes widely with others, transcending the boundaries of the family photograph album. Through this study of images shared publicly on Instagram, we investigate the ways that people ‘visibilise’ their sense of home in order to share it with others. We can see through this data the interplays between public and private, domestic and commercial, that digital photography and applications like Instagram have brought to light.
... The Instagram application launch in 2010 marked a new era of mobile photography as opposed to previous desktop photo-(and video-) sharing platforms (Manovich 2017). Photo-sharing became then part of the daily media consumption as communication includes the photographs and their context (Budge and Burness 2018), changing the former mnemonic communicative function of photography for a more present and phatic one, personal and professional (Barbour et al. 2017). Facebook-Inc Instagram has grown since its launch to recently celebrate 1 billion active users. ...
Race remains problematic in the twenty-first century for the reconstruction of historical German Holocaust memory through fictional cinema productions. A case study of black British director Amma Asante’s 2018 British romantic war drama film, Where Hands Touch, suggests the difficulty in adapting national race and race representation discourses for global Afro-diaspora audiences outside the German national and supranational European cinema context. The film caused controversy among transnational black audiences and American pop culture outlets. Even black British viewers flat-out rejected it on Twitter. They alleged that Asante deployed clichéd depictions of neo-romanticised interracial romance and naïve reformulations of historical racism, which were interpreted as an example of self-reproducing Blaxploitation. All this points to under-researched structures of transnational minority representations operating within contemporary Afro-European pop culture cinema. I foreground these relations as interstitial culture space, thus linking transnational German cinema’s racially loaded themes like the Holocaust and hybridity to a larger cinema of diasporic storytelling and questions about transnational film scholarship in the twenty-first century.
... Flaming in Twitter in Japan is commonplace and can possibly be considered as the platform that has users branching from the infamous Go-Channel (5Channel) bulletin board formerly known as Ni-Channel (2Channel) (Kaigo & Watanabe, 2007) where incivility is also rampant. Japanese Twitter users can release themselves from the their daily obligations and play a totally different Internet persona or online character (Barbour et al., 2017) to have a cathartic experience by expressing themselves through consummatory communication. Twitter users with common interests can find each other and become nakama or "allies" by teaming up and retweet common perspectives on issues, especially if there are conflicting opinions. ...
In comparison to other nations where Facebook has maintained its position as the most dominantly used SNS among each respective online population, the slow proportionate growth in total users of Facebook in Japan during recent years can be considered an anomaly. To verify the degree of usage of Facebook, this study conducted an online survey in January and March 2021 and sampled a total of 1959 Japanese adults. The survey was administered online among monitoring respondents of a research firm using quota sampling of their representative of the Japanese population distribution of gender, age and region of domicile. The survey results demonstrated Facebook had a lower ratio of users in Japan when compared to other available platforms such as the popular messaging service in Japan named LINE or Twitter. LINE, Twitter and Instagram had a statistically significant negative correlation with age, suggesting that the younger the respondent age, the more likely to use SNSs. In contrast to this finding, Facebook was the only SNS found to have no correlation with age. By investigating the Facebook users among this sample among different age groups, the survey found Facebook was in fact a more preferable platform than Instagram among Japanese online over 40. For Japanese online over 60, Facebook was found to be the second most preferred platform, higher than Instagram and Twitter. This study further investigated the features of Facebook that might be holding off more prevalent usage of this platform among younger Japanese online. The study also discusses Japanese sociocultural traits of Facebook users that may explain the generational rift in usage of Facebook among Japanese online. The paper suggests that network effects, potential Japanese cultural variant explanations of SIDE to SNS usage, and cultural characteristics in relation to different generations affect usage of Facebook among Japanese online.
To access the full article:
http://ibiblio.org/nmediac/2021/Kaigo_Facebook.html
The present study addresses one possible template for exploring the meanings of photojournalistic self-presentation on Instagram. I employ automedial close reading for the data collected from one Instagram user and his profile in the cases of two professional photojournalists: Ed Kashi and Sebastian Rich. I test and develop the process of close reading in the context of Instagram and professional photojournalism. I am founding this practice on an active, sensitive interpretation process, not code identification, by combining qualitative research and autoethnographic personal narrative. The approach implies a theoretical, conceptual, and contextual reflection with and against the texts and subjects of study. This study frames the automedial production on Instagram as readable texts. Instagram-based research into photojournalism as a profession and practice needs theory-based qualitative approaches, such as close reading, based on small datasets. Whilst its focus is on the methodological approach, the paper opens up perspectives on studying the self-presentational identity work of an Instagram author, showing the value of automedial close reading.
This chapter analyses the 381 first Instagram posts tagged with one of the ten keywords about German Cinema. The research combines digital methods for the data collection and a series of quantitative, qualitative and network analysis to identify some of the features of the discussion emerging around this topic. The question asked involves what kind of idea of German Cinema is represented on Instagram, where are these posts published from, and what kind of network of interaction can be inferred from this practice. The responses show that there is a tendency to represent the German cinema produced during the Weimarer Republik or the most recent productions highlighting the promotional capacity of Instagram as a platform. Regarding the location of the posts, the majority of them are from European based profiles; but a good number came from Latin American locations and particularly from institutional profiles with the role of promoting the German Culture, such as the Goethe Institut; and the network analysis of users and hashtags shows that there is a community of interaction that acknowledges and uses similar hashtags in their posts. This work is a first exploration and a methodological demonstration of how Instagram research can help the understanding of cultural communication, as well as research on Communicative spaces.
How are teachers who identify as “digital literacy trailblazers’ exploring and experimenting with digital tools in their English classrooms? Based on a study of English teaching with digital tools, this paper draws on the case of one secondary school teacher and her year 9 class as they read Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank) and engage with three digital applications in their learning about historical context, literary language and narrative voice. The case is presented in order to discuss digital literacy practices in the context of English curriculum and pedagogy.
The article at hand theorizes the political economic shift between the aesthetic strategies deployed by network television in the broadcast-era and those deployed in the matrix-era. It argues that where in the former era certain strategies allowed for the disciplining of viewers’ sensory dimensions and in turn allowed for the ‘factory’ process of watching-labour to penetrate the private lives of people, in the latter era this factory process has not only collapsed into the home but also into viewers’ sensoria. And, that this is due to the nature of the control mechanisms embedded in the new aesthetic strategies deployed by media-capital through second-screen technologies. This article concludes by theorizing said set of mechanisms as an iteration of a society-wide aesthetic of control essential to the operation of contemporary capitalism.
Before Facebook, Twitter, and most of the digital media platforms that now form routine parts of our online lives, Jay Bolter (2000) anticipated that online activities would reshape how we understand and produce identity: a ‘networked self’, he noted, ‘is displacing Cartesian printed self as a cultural paradigm’ (2000, p. 26). The twenty-first century has not only produced a proliferation and mass popularisation of platforms for the production of public digital identities, but also an explosion of scholarship investigating the relationship between such identities and technology. These approaches have mainly focussed on the relations between humans and their networks of other human connections, often neglecting the broader implications of what personas are and might be, and ignoring the rise of the non-human as part of social networks. In this introductory essay, we seek to both trace the work done so far to explore subjectivity and the public presentation of the self via networked technologies, and contribute to these expanding accounts by providing a brief overview of what we consider to be five important dimensions of an online persona. In the following, we identify and explicate the five dimensions of persona as public, mediatised, performative, collective and having intentional value and, while we acknowledge that these dimensions are not exhaustive or complete, they are certainly primary.
The current fascination with social media sites has undoubtedly made many parts of our lives more public. We are increasingly publicising not only our activities, relationships and cultural preferences, but also the way we think and understand the world. These new data streams provide avenues for researchers to gather insight into both personal and public opinion and behaviour. One particular space that has attracted scholarly attention is the live tweeting of television. As audiences discuss television shows through second-screen applications, researchers have an opportunity to gain insight into the way viewers engage with elements of a media text without soliciting or directing the discussion. With second-screen use becoming increasingly common through a range of audience types, a wider approach is necessary, in order to encompass a fuller range of audience behaviour, than the current tendency to examine the audience as members of a fandom. This chapter reports on a focused study of tweets relating to the first broadcast of the second season of Love Child (Nine Network, 2015). This analysis focuses specifically on how the collected tweets reference actors and characters, demonstrating that Twitter studies can make visible audience identification practices. In particular, the analysis identifies three key behavioural elements: direct address to the actors, either inside or outside the diegetic space; tagging actors while referencing character behaviour; and character bleed.
Full text available free here: http://www.adelaide.edu.au/press/titles/publics/
This article explores interpersonal meaning in social media photographs, using the representation of motherhood in Instagram images as a case study. It investigates the visual choices that are made in these images to construe relationships between the represented participants, the photographer, and the ambient social media viewer. The author draws upon existing work on the visual systems of point of view and focalization to explore interpersonal meaning in these images, and proposes that an additional system – subjectification – is needed to account for the kinds of relationship between the viewer and the photographer that are instantiated in social photographs, as well as the ways in which subjectivity is signaled in these images. The dataset analyzed is the entire Instagram feed of a single user who posts images of her experience of motherhood and a collection of 500 images using the hashtag #motherhood.
Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media. This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.
This paper examines two ‘ends’ of identity online – birth and death – through the analytical lens of specific hashtags on the Instagram platform. These ends are examined in tandem in an attempt to surface commonalities in the way that individuals use visual social media when sharing information about other people. A range of emerging norms in digital discourses about birth and death are uncovered, and it is significant that in both cases the individuals being talked about cannot reply for themselves. Issues of agency in representation therefore frame the analysis. After sorting through a number of entry points, images and videos with the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months in 2014. Ultrasound images and videos on Instagram revealed a range of communication and representation strategies, most highlighting social experiences and emotional peaks. There are, however, also significant privacy issues as a significant proportion of public accounts share personally identifiable metadata about the mother and unborn child, although these issue are not apparent in relation to funeral images. Unlike other social media platforms, grief on Instagram is found to be more about personal expressions of loss rather than affording spaces of collective commemoration. A range of related practices and themes, such as commerce and humour, were also documented as a part of the spectrum of activity on the Instagram platform. Norms specific to each collection emerged from this analysis, which are then compared to document research about other social media platforms, especially Facebook.
Infants, toddlers, and preschoolers are now growing up in environments saturated with a variety of traditional and new technologies, which they are adopting at increasing rates. Although there has been much hope for the educational potential of interactive media for young children, accompanied by fears about their overuse during this crucial period of rapid brain development, research in this area still remains limited. This policy statement reviews the existing literature on television, videos, and mobile/interactive technologies; their potential for educational benefit; and related health concerns for young children (0 to 5 years of age). The statement also highlights areas in which pediatric providers can offer specific guidance to families in managing their young children's media use, not only in terms of content or time limits, but also emphasizing the importance of parent-child shared media use and allowing the child time to take part in other developmentally healthy activities.
The growth of Instagram continues, with the majority of its users being young women. This study investigates the impact of Instagram upon source credibility, consumer buying intention and social identification with different types of celebrities. In-depth interviews were conducted with 18 female Instagram users aged 18–30 to determine the extent to which Instagram influences their buying behaviour. The research findings show that celebrities on Instagram are influential in the purchase behaviour of young female users. However, non-traditional celebrities such as bloggers, YouTube personalities and ‘Instafamous’ profiles are more powerful, as participants regard them as more credible and are able to relate to these, rather than more traditional, celebrities. Female users are perceptively aware and prefer to follow Instagram profiles that intentionally portray positive images and provide encouraging reviews.
This section investigates the broad public markets for the commodification of the intimate and the private and examines the fluidity and, perhaps, the irrelevance of a boundary governing the public and the private. What is the private life/sphere if it is so easily and readily made available for production, dissemination, and consumption? These chapters are particularly interested in how these issues play out with individuals, particularly public figures and celebrities, who cultivate personas for the public and use various modes and discourses of intimacy in order to affirm and manage both their image and the publics consuming it. Chapters 11 and 12 focus on the consumption power of various publics to shape the practices and strategies of both corporate and charitable institutions. Chapter 13 explores how print media can (re) mobilise intimacies and feelings forged elsewhere in order to manage and shape how publics interact with music celebrities and their careers. The final chapter argues that public and private performances of spiritual practice on contemporary television programming in India offer us new models for a post-secular citizenship
A large body of research has documented that exposure to images of thin fashion models contributes to women's body dissatisfaction. The present study aimed to experimentally investigate the impact of attractive celebrity and peer images on women's body image. Participants were 138 female undergraduate students who were randomly assigned to view either a set of celebrity images, a set of equally attractive unknown peer images, or a control set of travel images. All images were sourced from public Instagram profiles. Results showed that exposure to celebrity and peer images increased negative mood and body dissatisfaction relative to travel images, with no significant difference between celebrity and peer images. This effect was mediated by state appearance comparison. In addition, celebrity worship moderated an increased effect of celebrity images on body dissatisfaction. It was concluded that exposure to attractive celebrity and peer images can be detrimental to women's body image.
Instagram, the rising photo-sharing social networking site, has gained an enormous amount of global popularity. This study examined the relationship between narcissism and Instagram users' self-promoting behavior. A total of 212 active Instagram users in Korea completed an online survey. The results showed that individuals higher in narcissism tended to post selfies and self-presented photos, update their profile picture more often, and spend more time on Instagram, as compared to their counterparts. They also rated their Instagram profile pictures as more physically attractive. Additionally, the results showed that Grandiose Exhibitionism positively predicted and Leadership/Authority negatively predicted the frequency of selfie postings and profile picture updates, as well as profile picture evaluations. However, Entitlement/Exploitativeness exhibited no effect on any of the self-promotion behaviors on Instagram.