Representing ‘development’ on Instagram: questioning ‘what’, ‘who’, and ‘how’ of development in digital space

ABSTRACT

Development institutions communicate about development through mediated communication strategies. The advent of image-intensive digital spaces such as Instagram has facilitated communication for these institutions, making ‘development’ more accessible to the public. However, the representation of development in these institutional digital spaces remains largely unexamined. By conceptualising Instagram as an emerging context for the ‘public face of development’, we conducted a content analysis of 300 Instagram posts by three major bilateral development agencies (USAID, DFID, and SIDA) in order to address critical questions concerning how they communicated about development agendas, subjects, and processes of development to the public. The study reveals that these representations of development in digital space largely adhere to feminised and infantilised visions of ‘ideal victimhood’ when projecting ‘what’ and ‘who’ should receive attention. These representations thus served to justify the Western-centred, neoliberal modes of development. Overall, these agencies’ communicative patterns regarding ‘how development can be achieved’ articulate perspectives on development to ‘look-good’ at home and ‘do-good’ abroad that make social change seem readily achievable.

KEYWORDS:

• Development communication
• communication about development
• ‌Instagram
• social media
• bilateral agency
• representation

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 This study was conducted before DFID was merged with the UK Foreign Office on 2 September 2020. Currently, the Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) administers British overseas aid, superseding DFID.

2 The random sampling strategy involved processing through a website, random.org/sequences/, that generates randomised sequences of integers for a given range. The total number of Instagram posts available on the day of access was input as the range, which was then output in random sequences of integers. For each of the agencies, we selected the first 100 integers from the output, with each of the integers representing the n^th Instagram post uploaded in the order of time sequence. The selected samples each covered the time range from July 2014 to August 2019 (USAID), from November 2012 to August 2019 (DFID), and from November 2012 to June 2019 (SIDA).

3 A recent study evaluating the accuracy of Google translations attests to the reliability of Swedish-English function, with a reported 86% accuracy in terms of ‘text free of grammatical errors’ and 99% accuracy in terms of ‘text that can be understood’ (Aiken 2019, 257).

4 According to the data reported by the United Nations Development Programme (n.d.), Sweden was ranked the third-lowest country on the Gender Inequality Index in 2017.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Michael Dokyum Kim

Michael Dokyum Kim is a doctoral student at University of Miami's School of Communication. His research interests relate to digital development and representations of development cooperation.

Karin Gwinn Wilkins

Karin Gwinn Wilkins (PhD, University of Pennsylvania) is Dean of the School of Communication at the University of Miami. Previously, she was Associate Dean for Faculty Advancement and Strategic Initiatives with the Moody College of Communication at the University of Texas at Austin. Her work addresses scholarship in the fields of development communication, gender and global communication.