Digital Life on Instagram

New Social Communication of Photography

Elisa Serafinelli

Emerald

This book can be opened with

Paperback / softback

9781787564985

31 August 2018

£48.99

eBook (PDF)

9781787564954

31 August 2018

£35.99

eBook (ePub)

9781787564978

31 August 2018

£35.99

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About

How does Instagram shape how we relate to each other online? Are users concerned about privacy when documenting their lives in fine detail? How does Instagram work as a marketing machine? Drawing on three years’ research with Instagram users, Elisa Serafinelli explores how Instagram is changing people’s visual experiences.

Instagram is now by far the most popular online photo sharing platform, fuelled by the growth of smart mobile devices, and the management of an online persona is now part of millions of people’s everyday reality. This has not gone unnoticed among commercial actors, with the savviest of these exploiting the social dynamics of sharing that underlie the very logic of Instagram.

This book addresses the issue of how mobile media and visual communication permeate people’s daily routines, how marketing influences practice, whether privacy and surveillance concerns are a reality, and how the platform shapes social relationships and identity formation. In its conclusion, the book advances the innovative concept of new mobile visualities to describe the social communication of photography and its huge expansion. Digital Life on Instagram is an online ethnography fit for the modern age of social media.

Chapter 1. New Approaches to Digital Photography and Online Photosharing Chapter 2. The Practice of Online Photosharing Chapter 3. Visual Social Relationships Chapter 4. Visual Media Marketing Chapter 5. Privacy and Surveillance Chapter 6. Identity: The Visual Self

In this online ethnographic study and critical interpretation of Instagram, author Elisa Serafinelli (sociology, University of Sheffield, UK) studies 44 Instagram users for three years to explore how Instagram users make use of photographs to create an online persona and what this means for identity formation, social relationships, privacy, and marketing. Drawing on the ideas of thinkers including Marshall McLuhan, Roland Barthes, Henry Jenkins, Anthony Giddens, Michel Foucault, and Jos’e van Dijck, the author explores how the ability to create and post images produces new forms of experiencing everyday life. In addition, she presents an original concept of mobile visualities to examine photography and social communication. B&w photos are included.
- Annotation ©2018

Elisa Serafinelli works as Research Associate in the School of Sociological Studies, University of Sheffield. She specialises in Media, Communication and Society with six years of experience in research and teaching. She has co-edited the book The Digital Transformation of the Public Sphere and published a recent study related to visual communication in the journal article Mobile Mediated Visualities: An Empirical Study of Visual Practices on Instagram. Her current research explores mobile media practices and the social behaviours that arise from it with particular focus on privacy and surveillance issues related to the growing use of drone technologies.