If You Didn’t Instagram It, Did It Really Happen?

If You Didn’t Instagram It, Did It Really Happen?

Providing evidence of life moments on Instagram through narrative image curation

Affluence, socioeconomic status and connoisseurship

Findings

• Instagram content showed strong connotative associations with pleasure, hedonism and recreation.
• An archive of life-affirming moments
• Images often contained 'aesthetic merit' or 'visual appeal'
• The ritual of image-sharing as a means of increasing social capital

The micro-celebrity

• Using Instagram to communicate with a 'public'
• Posting with an intended audience in mind
• Posting to attract a following

Accumulative reputation-building

Empathetic voyeurism

• Using Instagram to generate mutual experience.
• Achieving congruence between one another's documented life moments
• Acute awareness of others' experiences within a given network

27 % posted with an intended audience in mind

had an average of 155 followers each

Locative anchoring of place

• 114 minutes: The average amount of time per day that South Africans spend browsing the mobile web (inMobi survey, 2013).

• The average smartphone user in SA is between 18 and 34 years old, well-educated and in full-time employment

• Developing an exciting life narrative
• Taking photographs on behalf of others and uploading them contributes to the collective life narratives of a group or social circle.

38 % posted expressly for themselves

• Instagram was found to be used to anchor mobile identities to geographical locations
• 65% of questionnaire participants reported geo-tagging their photos on Instagram
• Strong emphasis on beautified spaces and natural phenomena

had an average of 117 followers each

Conclusion

• The study found that Instagram user behaviour is motivated by a) an awareness of audience, b) the desire to maintain and accommodate a specific ‘public’, and c) the desire to construct a version of the self by creating digitised visual evidence.
• Instagram accomodates and shapes its users' aesthetic inclinations, emphasising symbolic composition of experience.

Categorisation

The Literature

Landscapes/natural phenomena

Places of interest

‘Selfies’

Cityscapes

Social snapshots

Food/drink

Architecture/interiors

News/promotional

Fashion

Conceptual/artistic

Chalfen (1981) – snapshot culture has replaced the former Kodak culture.

Tan (2013) & Olsson, et. al (2008) – cultural memory-making; images as ‘digital artifacts’

Miller & Edwards (2007) – online ‘Snapr’ cultures gravitate towards a more deliberate arrangement of images with more frequent sharing.

Multisilta & Milrad (2009) – Life logging/life publishing

Methods

I used a combination of two methods to gather data:

a) Questionnaire data from a sample of 26 Instagram users between the ages of 19 and 30.

b) A visual semiotic analysis of images posted by a pool of 74 Instagram users at rolling 24-hour intervals.