Description
Book SynopsisTwo billion people around the world use Instagram, but so far social scientists have done little research on the platform. Despite Instagram''s reputation for shallowness, the ongoing self-presentation it demands confronts users with profound dilemmas. Who are we? What do we want to show of ourselves? What do we aspire to be?On Display is a book about how people remake their worlds through social media. John D. Boy and Justus Uitermark provide an encompassing account of how a platform that is unfailingly polished and ruthlessly judgmental shapes us and our environments. They examine how personalities, relations, social movements, urban subcultures, and city streets change as they are represented on Instagram. Interviews and ethnographic vignettes render an intimate account of the desires and anxieties that animate the platform. Just as importantly, Boy and Uitermark reveal how Instagram is implicated in social inequalities.While previous accounts have argued that social media promote p
Trade ReviewBy drawing together granular stories of everyday life and extrapolating visual trends via computational data, Boy and Uitermark uncover how users navigate their social status, social lives, and social spaces through the delicate inter-weaving of social ties on Instagram. On Display's focus on Amsterdam on Instagram is central reading for understanding how digital life worlds, mediatized realities, and networked socio-geographies become integral for reflexive contradictions and productive tensions arising from life on the 'gram.' * Crystal Abidin, co-author of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures *
This fascinating book takes a snapshot of how Amsterdam is represented on Instagram to explore provocative questions of class, status, and hierarchy. Rather than functioning as a public square or fostering activism, Boy and Uitermark find that Instagram encourages feel-good aesthetics and conformity, privileging the viewpoints of the city's most privileged residents. Meticulously researched and full of lively accounts from a range of Instagram users, On Display asks us to consider how our social lives and very sense of self are impacted by the social platforms we use. * Alice E. Marwick, author of The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media *
In this groundbreaking study, Boy and Uitermark focus on Instagram as a mediator of everyday life. Their emphasis on the importance of social status in social media is especially productive, and so too are the connections they make to a specific urban context. All this makes the book essential reading for anyone interested in cities, digital media, and social life. * Gillian Rose, co-author of The New Urban Aesthetic: Digital Experiences of Urban Change *
Boy and Uitermark offer a remarkably innovative interrogation of Instagram's everyday users that underlines the perplexing ambiguity of all visual social media. Their nuanced interpretation reveals Instagram's confounding capacity to enable both the competitive display of social status and the sincere performance of the authentic self. This book deserves our deep attention. * Sharon Zukin, author of The Innovation Complex: Cities, Tech, and the New Economy *
On Display is a superlative contribution to our understanding of social media and urban life. Not only does it draw on sustained data collection, analysis, and re-analysis, but it is written in the tradition of the best ethnographic work: richly descriptive, and frankly enjoyable to read. More concerned with how social media and social status intersect in the city than a narrow study of one platform, Boy and Uitermark's book will remain relevant long after Instagram's influence and importance wanes. * Scott Rodgers, Birkbeck, University of London, and Editor of Mediapolis: A Journal of Cities and Culture *
Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Chapter 1: Introduction Chapter 2: Status and Social Media Chapter 3: Selves and Others Chapter 4: Curating Contention Chapter 5: Integration and Conformity Chapter 6: Staging Status Chapter 7: Conclusion Appendix: A Note on Methods Notes References Index
