This week in BCM111, the topic of global social media was discussed as well as the affordances, niches, and shared affinities that social media platforms can contain and are utilised by social media users.
Of all the social media platforms I frequent, the one I use the most to present my sense of self is Instagram. I am in love with Instagram! I have two accounts, one for my private life and one to promote my passion for makeup and drag. On Instagram, followers and users see others’ lives through online media, primarily photos and videos. My Instagram accounts enable me to present a sense of my authentic self and a persona. My private account shares my authentic life with my closest friends and family, whereas my public account shares my drag persona with a broader global audience. Personas are a very popular way for people to present a sense of self on Instagram, although it is easy to create an ingenuine and completely false reality. The article ‘Selling brands while staying “Authentic”: The professionalisation of Instagram influencers’, discusses how Instagram influencers carefully choreograph their own authenticity when managing their online personas, including sharing, and creating personal content depicting their everyday life through selfies, using products that fit their online persona and creating other kinds of content.
Zoe Hurley’s article ‘Imagined Affordances of Instagram and the Fantastical Authenticity of Female Gulf-Arab Social Media Influencers’ discusses the many affordances that Instagram includes, allowing users to present a sense of self. These include practices such as communicating with others through messaging, sharing, posting, liking, and commenting on a wide range of content. Instagram’s affordances allow me to express my persona on social media as it helps grow my platform and progress my skills as a drag queen. Compared to other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, Instagram allows me to share my persona solely through photos and short videos which I find is the easiest way to share makeup and drag content. Compared to these other platforms, Instagram is most commonly used for photo sharing whereas Facebook and Twitter are commonly used for information sharing and YouTube for video sharing.
There is most definitely an audience for my online persona as evident in my follower numbers and number of likes and views my posts have received. Currently, my account has 788 followers with my most liked post having 120 likes and most viewed video reel reaching 2,546 viewers. There is a large drag community on Instagram that has grown during this pandemic with the birth of many ‘lockdown queens’ starting and sharing their drag journey. I believe that most of my audience is international, primarily in the US and Britain, with only a few from Australia. Drag is very large in these areas so it makes sense that most of my followers are from these regions.
Citation
Hurley, Z., 2019, ‘Imagined Affordances of Instagram and the Fantastical Authenticity of Female Gulf-Arab Social Media Influencers’, Social Media + Society.
van Driel, L. & Dumitrica, D., 2021, ‘Selling brands while staying “Authentic”: The professionalization of Instagram influencers’, Convergence, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 66–84.
Gabrielle Lloyd 