Two days, twenty outfits: Coachella attendees’ visual presentation of self and experience on Instagram

Abstract

This study uses a visual discourse analysis to explore the self-construction of presence and experience at events such as a music festival, theoretically guided by presentation of self and how users curate this via multimodal, visual-focussed social media posts. Real-time, location-based, public posts from events act as a new form of visually-embedded culture in how individuals present themselves and their experiences. An analysis of 200 location-tagged Instagram posts from attendees at the 2017 Coachella music festival reveals attendees care less about sharing photos of the music and more about curating a visual sense of taste, embrace and place. This focus on self-presentation is explored through themes such as seeing more full-body images than selfies in order to emphasise festival fashion, use of the ‘plandid’ (planned candid) to add a sense of spontaneity, and use of chronological and geographic tags to establish physical presence in time and place.

Keywords:

• Instagram
• geo-location
• presentation of self
• visual discourse analysis
• Coachella

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge Drs. Mary Bock and Dhiraj Murthy for their guidance, as well as the anonymous reviewers at this journal and from the Visual Communication Division of AEJMC.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Instagram connectivity to Netlytic has since been disabled due to changes in the Instagram API on December 11, 2018: https://netlytic.org/home/?page_id=254.

2 A methods note: The author recommends making these screenshots and/or saving the information offline as soon as possible after data collection. Instagram allows users several ways to remove posts from public viewing—deleting the post, archiving the post, turning the entire profile private, blocking users or deleting the profile entirely. Additionally, Instagram may remove, block or limit posts. This can happen at any point after a post is made, making it possible for a researcher to find multiple dead links within the downloaded spreadsheet. To illustrate this, all posts from the initial scrape were passed through a link-checking utility seven months after the initial data collection. Of the original 13,355 posts, 22.46% of weekend one and 22.07% of weekend two posts were no longer accessible, meaning these posts had been removed from public viewing.