CONSTRUCTING THE CORPORATE INSTAGRAM DISCOURSE – A CRITICAL VISUAL DISCOURSE APPROACH

Abstract

Since October 2010, the Instagram app has provided its users with means of visual communication that previously were reserved for professional photographers. Simultaneously, the Instagram Corporation’s official blog has offered suggestions on how the features of the app could be applied. In this manner, the corporation has established a norm of Instagram use. Norms of technology use, i.e., socially learned ways of behaving and communicating with technology, are well-researched in technology and science studies, but thus far these studies have only included social media, e.g., Instagram, to a minor degree. Furthermore, it remains largely unexplored how these social rules are represented multimodally in discourses about social media technology. Through a critical multimodal discourse analysis, this paper describes how the aforementioned corporate regulative norms on the usage of Instagram were established on the corporate blog from 2010 to 2014. The findings show that the discourse on the blog adjusts its focus. Initially, it dealt with correctional tools for the app, but it then progressed into presenting tools for experimental visual expression. At the same time, the blog confines the experimental uses of the application and, thereby, the possible perception of what entertaining imagery is. This way, the study demonstrates how the Instagram Corporation seeks to regulate the use of the app.