Publication details
The Language and Communicative Practices of 'Instagirls'
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | This paper focuses on the current trend of celebrity construction on social media, particularly Instagram, and investigates the communicative practices of so-called Instagirls. The term ‘Instagirls’ is used to designate female users of Instagram who utilized their presence on social media and sprang to fame thanks to their captivating posts and large followership. The data used in the analysis consists of Instagram posts of three randomly-chosen Instagirls. These posts, manually collected and preserved with the associated metadata (pictures, videoclips), were divided into five categories based on their content and function: public, private-like, repost, product, public awareness. The classification revealed which aspects of Instagirls’ lives are emphasized in their profiles and the way their online identity is constructed. The analysis (inspired by discourse analysis) demonstrates that Instagirls employ various strategies to promote their online visibility, e.g. hashtags and tagging. Furthermore, the stylistic and lexical choices, the use of emoji and the multimodal aspects of the posts are examined. The author also aims to show that the influence of online celebrities such as Instagirls is no longer limited to social media but extends to various aspects of public life. Their popularity on social media has earned them a valued place in, for example, marketing, advertising, awareness-raising activities and politics. It thus can be assumed that the rise of Instagirls and further development of this phenomenon supports the principles of social media logic (van Dijck & Poell, 2013). |
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