Thesis

Digital Socialization and Audiovisual Creativity

Social Construction of the Image through Instagram

Abstract

Our digital world is becoming increasingly visual. Mobile applications focused on digital photography, such as Instagram, serve as vehicles for the creation, manipulation, and instant dissemination of images. Instagram is, therefore, an open window for research in Social Sciences and Digital Humanities, offering an opportunity to study how users of this application develop visual culture in their environments through global visual languages.

This study analyzes Instagram production in Granada based on a sample of 955,564 posts and 375,758 geolocated images collected over a year (from April 2017 to April 2018), aiming to show how the image of a city is socially constructed. The geographic, social network, and content analysis of the study sample has helped identify the main visual attraction points in the city, the most active neighborhoods and districts on Instagram, and the most relevant members of a self-constructed, heterogeneous, and open user network, featuring strong intermediary nodes with an “Instagrammer” style that connect sub-communities. Additionally, the study highlights the widespread use of the application for both business promotion and individual creativity development.

All of this illustrates how Instagram posts in Granada highlight the importance and impact of key aspects such as tourism, transforming the generated data into a showcase of the city’s image and the construction of local visual culture.

Access to digital copy in UGR Digibug repo