Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram

Leaver, Tama; Highfield, Tim

doi:10.1080/1369118x.2016.1259343

Cited by 70 publications

(56 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…Indeed, on popular social media apps such as Instagram, sharing pregnancy images publicly has become commonplace and can often reinforce a particularly narrow and normative notion of pregnancy and related practices (Tiidenberg & Baym, 2017). A study tracking the hashtag #ultrasound across 3 months in 2014 found that more than 11,000 media items were posted publicly on Instagram, and of the sonograms, more than 34% displayed personally identifiable information, such as the metadata shown on the screen during the ultrasound scans (Leaver & Highfield, 2016). Pregnancy apps and the sharing of pregnancy-related material on social media are thus elements of a much wider social sharing of prenatal information and media online.…”

Section: Pregnancy To Infancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online

Leaver

2017

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

100

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Parents are increasingly sharing information about infants online in various forms and capacities. To more meaningfully understand the way parents decide what to share about young people and the way those decisions are being shaped, this article focuses on two overlapping areas: parental monitoring of babies and infants through the example of wearable technologies and parental mediation through the example of the public sharing practices of celebrity and influencer parents. The article begins by contextualizing these parental practices within the literature on surveillance, with particular attention to online surveillance and the increasing importance of affect. It then gives a brief overview of work on pregnancy mediation, monitoring on social media, and via pregnancy apps, which is the obvious precursor to examining parental sharing and monitoring practices regarding babies and infants. The examples of parental monitoring and parental mediation will then build on the idea of "intimate surveillance" which entails close and seemingly invasive monitoring by parents. Parental monitoring and mediation contribute to the normalization of intimate surveillance to the extent that surveillance is (re)situated as a necessary culture of care. The choice to not survey infants is thus positioned, worryingly, as a failure of parenting.

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Section: Pregnancy To Infancymentioning

confidence: 99%

Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online

Leaver

2017

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

100

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“…The role and function of the hashtag has been much discussed in this respect (Alam et al 2017;Highfield & Leaver 2015Leaver & Highfield 2018), yet of particular interest to us is the persona work that is done when hashtags move Instagram users beyond their micropublics (Marshall 2014) to broader publics, and signal a desire to not only contribute to and participate in particular conversations, but mark and legitimise specific archives and taxonomies. By inviting viewers to consider the relation between the image and the tag, hashtags also provide opportunities for performances of wittiness and cleverness to sarcasm, politics, and even dullness: #dog, when accompanied by a picture of a dog, indicates a movement from the individual's relationship to the animal, towards a much larger public of dog owner's sharing their images via the platform.…”

Section: The Dimensions Of Instagram Persona Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Through both the content uploaded and the activities of sharing, the platforms' users are heavily involved in persona work. Although not always framed in terms of persona, scholars have been intrigued by the identity practices of Instagram users from the visual media offered by public figures and celebrities to how Instagram content and activities respond to, influence, and depict physical, emotional, and psychological health (Brown & Tiggemann 2016;Djafarova & Rushworth 2017;Duguay 2017;Highfield & Leaver 2016;Leaver & Highfield 2018;Markham 2015;Moon et al 2016;Moreno et al 2016;Olszanowski 2014;Pittman & Reich 2016;Zappavigna 2016). However, the vast majority of users are not public figures and, indeed, much content and activity on Instagram is not very glamorous and more mundane.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study

Barbour

Lee²,

Moore

2017

Pers Stud

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<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>

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“…Recent research by Katrin Tiidenberg and Nancy Baym (2017), for example, has shown that pregnant women are often socially compelled to share images of their pregnant bodies and "perform" pregnancy on social media in relatively constrained ways. Similarly, prenatal ultrasound images are also routinely shared online, visualizing and establishing a social media footprint for infants before they are actually born (Leaver, 2015;Leaver & Highfield, 2016).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Infancy Online: An Introduction

Leaver

Nansen

2017

Social Media + Society

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This article introduces a Special Issue on the topic of infancy online, addressing a range of issues, including representation, privacy, datafication, and children's rights. The 7 articles included map important arenas of emerging research which highlight a range of increasingly urgent questions around the way infants are situated online, the longer term ramifications of infant online presences, and the ways in which infants and young children participate as users of online media.

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Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram

Cited by 70 publications

References 28 publications

Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online

Intimate Surveillance: Normalizing Parental Monitoring and Mediation of Infants Online

Online Persona Research: An Instagram Case Study

Infancy Online: An Introduction

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