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.</p><p>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>

A Typology of Persona as Suggested by Jungian Theory and the Evolving Persona Studies Literature

“…However, the authors use a variety of methodological approaches, including Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA), a largely interview-based method devised by the psychologist Jonathan Smith (Smith, Flowers & Larkin 2009), which has been used extensively in health and clinical psychology as an alternative to the 'suspicious' modes of enquiry such as discourse analysis, precisely because it does not try to frame individual accounts of experience as subjective accounts of reality. This fits with Jungian psychology in that it allows access to an agentic self 'behind the mask' who is performing the persona and it enables the researcher to explore the ways that those individuals construct their (largely online) personas (Barbour, Lee & Moore 2017;Marshall et al 2020). At the same time, the 'interpretative' aspect of IPA allows researchers to acknowledge their own analytic input into the meaning-making process (rather than taking interview accounts, at face value, as undisputed 'truth').…”

“…overcoming parental disapproval of seeking an artistic career) and, together with other artist representations (appearance, social class, mental health), continue to frame expectations of "artistness" that can act as a deterrent for some aspiring artists while offering opportunities to others. Examining persona construction in a highly diverse sample of creative individuals (including tattoo artists and street artists), Barbour's research documented how contemporary artists both exploited and subverted these mythical representations to fashion (online) personas that were recognisable as artistic even though they work within non-traditional practices (Barbour, Lee & Moore 2017).…”

Sharing #home on Instagram

“…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. 2).…”

Second-screen subsumption: Aesthetics of control and the second-screen facilitation of hyper-attentive watching-labour

“…The question of ‘self-fashioning work’ as the fragmentation of individuals’ subjectivities into constructed public identities, and their role vis-a-vis consumer/control society, has also partly been taken up in the field of Persona Studies. For instance, a case-study on the persona-crafting uses of Instagram in the online portrayal of watching television carried out by Barbour, Lee and Moore, arguably illustrates that this self-fashioning ‘visibility labour’ performed by users collapses the domestic sphere into public (2017: 1–3) – making a spectacle out of the mundane, and in some cases even directly reinforces consumer society. In terms of the local level of media-capital, these are second-screen practices correspondent with valorization process (c) of the SFHA-mechanism.…”

“…In terms of the local level of media-capital, these are second-screen practices correspondent with valorization process (c) of the SFHA-mechanism. The authors’ observation that this labour is sometimes carried out without the aims of persona-crafting or personal expression (Barbour et al, 2017: 8), summons a crucial question: if this work is unremunerated in a monetary, social and personal sense, then why are users performing these acts of labour, apparently autonomously? Is this behaviour really autonomous or is it the corollary of a control mechanism intervening into synaesthetic systems?…”