#tableforone: exploring representations of dining out alone on Instagram

Abstract

In contemporary western society connections with others have become more fluid. This fluidity, in turn, impacts how people think about, understand, and engage in leisure. For instance, more people are choosing to partake in leisure practices that have traditionally been done in the company of others, alone. Yet people who choose to engage in solo leisure may face stigmatization for doing so. With these ideas in mind, the purpose of this paper is to examine representations of dining out alone on Instagram associated with #tableforone. Our findings illustrate how people use #tableforone to represent the importance of valuing alone time and treating oneself. Our findings also demonstrate the ways #tableforone can be used to confront the stigma tied to engaging in public leisure practices alone.

Women’s outdoor adventure experiences on Instagram: exploring user-generated content

“…Meraz (2009, p.682) explained that SMSs, like Instagram, are 'architected by design to readily support participation, peer-to-peer conversation, collaboration, and community'. Within these digital contexts, individuals have an imagined, often limitless, audience to whom they extend aspirational identities, reflections of their practices and subjective evaluations of the environment around them (Hine 2015;Marwick & Boyd, 2011;McKeown & Miller, 2019). Thereby, social science researchers increasingly recognise online interactions as fertile sources for understanding subpopulations of our society (Hine, 2015;Kozinets, 2010;Lupton, 2015;Laestadius, 2016;Lugosi & Quinton, 2018).…”

“…Terms like netnography (Kozinets, 2010), were coined to conceptualise online research employed to understand social and cultural phenomena in digital communities and contexts. Though Kozinets (2010) insists the distinct need for human presence in netnographic enquiries, recent studies illuminate the malleable approaches and methods used for a variety of online settings from passively 'lurking' in cyberspaces (Jeffery, Ashraf, & Parris, 2019), actively participating in real-time online conversations, to analysing public-domain social media content (McKeown & Miller, 2019;Stanley, 2020). Aligning with the latter, our adapted netnographic approach is passive, focussing on the demand side of outdoor adventure through an examination of UGC of women's experiences on Instagram.…”

“…In total, 1154 posts were collected across the three hashtags: #womenoutdoors (615 posts), #womeninadventure (99 posts) and #shewentwild (440 posts), yielding a sizable data set compared to other similar studies (e.g. Lamont & Ross 2019; Gray et al 2018;McKeown & Miller 2019). We were guided by purposive sampling and posts that were no longer publicly available, or an account that was no longer active, were removed from the dataset.…”

“…This study analyses a significantly larger data set compared to similar studies (e.g. Lamont & Ross 2019; Gray et al 2018;McKeown & Miller 2019) and unlike previous studies, it examines women's participation in a range of outdoor adventure activities regardless of their geographic location. It also scrutinises both the caption and image posted.…”