Instagrammatics and digital methods: studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji

ABSTRACT

Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media. This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content. In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms.

KEYWORDS:

• Visual social media
• Instagram
• visual communication
• digital methods

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Further tools developed by the DMI, including the Tumblr tool, have hashtag searches as options, which can be useful for a consistent departure for multi-platform research – while noting, of course, the different structural and individual uses and non-uses of hashtags.

2. This is using the official Unicode set: other developers have created emoji that are explicitly of vaginas, for example (Dusenbury, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tim Highfield

Tim Highfield is Vice-Chancellor’s Research Fellow at Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia, where he is a member of the Digital Media Research Centre. His fellowship project is ‘Visual Cultures of Social Media’, and he is the author of Social Media and Everyday Politics (Polity, 2016). He is @timhighfield on Twitter and can be found at timhighfield.net.

Tama Leaver

Tama Leaver is a senior lecturer in the Department of Internet Studies at Curtin University, Perth, Australia. His books include Artificial Culture: Identity, Technology and Bodies (Routledge, 2012); An Education in Facebook? Higher Education and the World’s Largest Social Network (Routledge, 2014); and Social, Casual and Mobile Games: The Changing Gaming Landscape (Bloomsbury Academic, 2016). He is @tamaleaver on Twitter and can be found online at www.tamaleaver.net.