CONSTRUCTING INSTAGRAM AS OBJECT OF

My study of Instagram consisted of observations conducted on Instagram in the winter of 2018 through a researcher profile I created on the platform. Over a two-month period I followed profiles and hashtags, scrolling my way through images and videos. My intention with this research was not to become a native on the platform, and my observations were therefore those of an observer, not a participant.

To gain a knowledge and sense of Instagram as an organizing device, I also turned my attention to the documents, news, and information Instagram provides to its users and stakeholders. My observations of the platform’s user interface were thus supplemented with a collection of official Instagram blog posts on https://about.instagram.com/blog, where updates and changes to the platform are announced. This webpage functions both as a blog for press releases (news, updates, etc.) and as a timeline of Instagram’s history (although this has now disappeared from the webpage). The blog is publicly accessible through the Instagram homepage, which is to say that, unlike the Instagram platform, access is not contingent on one creating an Instagram account. I read through the updates about the platform design and the interface, generally taking note of news related to the Instagram enterprise, but more particularly of the new features and functions announced. For a researcher that had not used Instagram, news about updates of the interface and app proved a valuable introduction to the platform. The historical timeline outlining the development of the interface and app provided information about key functions and features of the medium, when they had been integrated, and how they had developed over time. These updates provided insight into not only changes to the platform but also to how Instagram itself observes its users and speaks about itself.

As such my interest here was and continues to be less in individual Instagram users, uses and experiences and more in the platform itself and its structuring logics as it pertains to the intended (and perhaps less intended)

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organization of user experience. Informed by the literature I read alongside carrying out observations three particular features of the platform became prominent: the stream as a way in which content is temporally organized, Instagram filters as a way of personalizing images, and the genre of the selfie image. Against the backdrop of organization theory and the theorists of media and organization that I included in my reading – i.e. Baudrillard and Stiegler – all these features seemed to contain organizing qualities and that of a nature that challenged conventional ideas about how we can understand the relation between organization, consumption, and technology.

Fragments: the stream, Instagram filters, and the selfie

As I pointed out in the Introduction media scholars point to methodological, analytical, and theoretical challenges related to the condition of digital proliferation.

This technological proliferation and the increasingly digitally mediatized world effect the analytical conditions and thus the means by which to proceed with one’s research, one’s method, so to speak, for getting into and interrogating the contemporary social media ‘system’. In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) Frederic Jameson describes a condition of the present as imposing a specific aesthetic experience, as that of being ‘exposed to a perceptual barrage of immediacy from which all sheltering layers and intervening mediations have been removed’; a condition that affects the very possibility and role of analysis and theory as the contemporary course of the world seems to resist any ‘adequate figuration’ – a statement in which Jodi Dean’s assertion of the increasingly impossibility of grasping ‘anything like a system’ reverberates (Dean 2010:3;

Jameson 1991:413). This condition destabilizes any external and stable plane of reference that would have provided any reassurance and certainty from which an analysis could proceed and theory be developed. As Baudrillard writes (Baudrillard 1993a:5) in a similar vein one eventually ends up in a state where it is impossible to

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separate the work of theory from that of hypothesis – a fundamental assertion that the course of things, the development of the world effects the condition, possibility, and strategy of analysis itself. Although this goes for all objects of study, this description particularly encapsulates the ever-evolving and expanding object of social media platforms. This is not only because social media platforms are technologies that can change overnight and are thus slippery objects of study, but also because we humans let these technologies organize much of our lives – researchers or not – and hence, the ground from which we can approach and apprehend the world around us.

The strategy for dealing with this condition for analysis and theorization has been to isolate specific Instagram functions. Entailed in this strategy is that I have constructed the organization of content in streams, Instagram filters, and the genre of the selfie image as three figures that I take to be telling of how the Instagram platform technologically organizes individual and social life. These three figures make up the empirical objects of my research and have been framed as, respectively, questions of the temporal organization of content, personalization, and the configuration of the subject as an object of consumption. These objects, each analysed in a separate chapter, function as a method of getting into and analysing Instagram as system of production and consumption memory. Theodor W. Adorno’s description of the essay and the use of fragments as method has also inspired this approach to and construction of these objects as an entryway to describing a broader system. Adorno writes in the Essay as Form: ‘It [the essay] thinks in fragments just as reality is fragmented and gains its unity only by moving through the fissures, rather than by smoothing them over’ (Adorno, Hullot-Kentor, and Will 1984:164).

The construction of the stream, Instagram filters, and the selfie as fragments is a method, a way in and through which to analyse a system of memory in constant expansion and mutation. This method of the essay and its fragments also imply a certain perception of the role and function of concepts and theory. Adorno writes:

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The essay does not obey the rules of the game of organized science and theory that, following Spinoza's principle, the order of things is identical with that of ideas. Since the airtight order of concepts is not identical with existence, the essay does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. (…). If the essay struggles aesthetically against that narrow-minded method that will leave nothing out, it is obeying an epistemological motive. (Adorno et al. 1984:158/164).

In the methods of the essay concept and reality, epistemology and ontology are not to be reconciled. The role of concepts is not to exhaust their objects of study, for there is a recognition that concepts play an active role in bringing forth the object of study, of constructing it. In this sense, concepts are used as devices of inquiry. In the words of Gilles Deleuze, they are ‘tools’ (Foucault 1980:208) and a lens through which an analysis operates in a state of unfolding a variety of perspectives rather than of providing an assured space for exhausting the object. From this standpoint, theories and concepts are phenomenological devices that produce theories and hypotheses in the same move, although not as a matter of falsification (Popper) or verification (positivism) but as a method and part of an aesthetic mode of inquiry.

In the context of my dissertation work, this means that I do not take the chosen empirical objects of the stream, Instagram filters, and the selfie image to exhaust how lived experiences are reproduced and consumed through Instagram, but take them, rather, to be a way of getting into and analysing a media phenomenon that is in a permanent process of expanding and in a perpetual flight towards being altered. My exploration and analysis of the stream, Instagram filters, and the selfie is theoretically motivated, in the sense that I seek to contribute to the further theorization of social media platforms as organizational technologies of consumption, rather than to the (equally important) empirical exposition of the behaviour and experiences of Instagram users. As suggested by the broader method of conceptual interventions that I outlined in the Introduction, the analysis does not

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seek to identify the potential cracks, the negotiations or the alternative uses that necessarily come with such media platforms, but through phenomenological description and analysis to distil and abstract an ideal version of the stream, Instagram filters, and the selfie. That is to say, the analyses and arguments in this dissertation have not emerged through a large-scale collection of empirical data aiming at uncovering how people use Instagram or their intention and motives for doing so. The analysis has rather been developed in an equal conversation between observations of the platform and collection of documents from Instagram.com, my reading of existing literature on social media platforms and the theoretical and conceptual work that I presented in Part I. Following the method Baudrillard used in System of Objects, my analysis of Instagram proceeds in a vignette style using phenomenological description as a means of capturing and thickening the description of the aesthetic organization of human experience as it takes place and is organized by the Instagram platform. As such, the three analyses of the stream, filters and the selfie, presented in Chapters 5, 6, and 7, should be understood as conceptual interventions that use a phenomenological and essayistic approach to contribute to a novel conceptualization of consumption; a reconceptualization that I see as necessary, as the nature of consumption is being reorganized and – I argue – recast by Instagram as one of today’s dominating organizational technologies.

The selfie and what the notion of tertiary retention implies

To end this chapter, I will just note that in Chapter 7 I approach the selfie genre and the selfie as a visual phenomenon. As I have pointed out, at the consumption level the analysis does not presuppose a singular relation between a subject and an object, but examines how objects are organized within a broader organization of objects. In the context of Instagram and social media platforms, I have related this organization to the question of tertiarizing individual and social life through different features and functions. The stream and filters are functions and features built into the

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Instagram platform and through which any photo image, can, independent of content, be brought into circulation. The selfie, however, is not a function but a particular photographic genre and depiction of self/body/face, albeit a genre in which images can be edited through various filters and which the stream organizes in the same way as other photo images. In other words, the selfie is not a function or feature of Instagram and thus not strictly speaking part of how the platform, as a system of memory, organizes lived experiences into tertiary memory. Still, the gesture of the selfie has become a generic form through which the individual brings its face and body into circulation, for which reason the selfie tells us something about Instagram as a system of memory. Thus, when it comes to the filter, I ask what the organizing principle of this function is and how the filter transforms lived experiences into consumable memory objects. With the selfie, though, my question concerns how the subject is configured as an object of consumption in and through the different distribution of subject and object positions in two different types of selfie images (the so-called presented selfie and the mirror-selfie). I ask: What is being consumed in these generic genres of visual tertiarizing and exteriorization of oneself? This also follows the strategy of Michel Foucault, of whom Nicolas Bourriaud writes: ‘Foucault is less interested by what the image says than by what it produces – the behaviour that it generates, and what it leaves barely seen among the social machinery in which it distributes bodies, spaces and utterances’ (Foucault, 2009, p. 13). The analysis is less concerned with what the specific image says, with what the intention or purposes of the selfie as generic genre of images are; rather it looks at the effects that come from distributing subject and object positions and in the gazes brought into play. This approach does not preclude a focus on specific Instagram photo images and thus on how for example Nature or the Body is consumed, as they are also reproduced and distributed as photo images on Instagram. Indeed, even at that level of analysis, the greater concern is the distribution of object and subject positions, the use of filters, and so forth, not the

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message of each photo image. The conceptual framing of ‘digital content’, including its organization, as tertiary retentions, entails (in a lineage of thinking that follows the work of Stiegler and Baudrillard) that photo images (including selfie photos) are primarily taken not as representations of something in time, of lived life, but are considered to play an organizing role in the fabric of temporal experience itself.

Thus, in Chapter 7, I address several variations of the selfie genre and analyse these as particular ways in which the lived experience of self is exteriorized, organized, and consumed as technological memory.

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