مطالعات رسانههای نوین (May 2023)
The netnography of Iranian user's culture in Instagram
Abstract
This research explored the Iranian user's ways of behavior in Instagram as a social networking service from the viewpoint of users’ online interactions and their daily life online representation. According to this, trying to get two main answers: “Recognizing cultural model in user's behaviors” and “identifying reasons and motivations of user's behaviors as a subsidiary purpose”. This research is based on ethnographic methodology and because of having a wide range of perspectives as a characteristic of contemporary ethnography, I used Symbolic Interactionism as a theoretical framework and the research method which is used for this purpose named Netnography by Robert Kozinets (2010). Netnography is a specific approach to conducting ethnography on the Internet. It is a qualitative and interpretive research methodology that adapts traditional ethnographic techniques to understand social interaction in contemporary digital communication contexts. The Netnography process in this research is based on the spiraling shells which Kozinets introduced: Introspection, Investigation, Information, Interview, Inspection, Interaction, Immersion, Indexing, Interpretation, Iteration, Instantiation, and Integration. Instagram's active personal pages on the topic of everyday life were considered as the unit of analysis. These page owners were primarily a blogger and some of them were influencers or micro-celebrities. According to this, the pages of Instagram horns or celebrities were not included in this research. The main data has been extracted from users’ captions or comments. The fifty pages with the highest rate of posts have been analyzed as Kozinets advised and their number of followers varied between fifty thousand to three hundred and fifty thousand. These criteria were considered for selection: the page owner displayed a meaningful narrative of her or his daily life in the rich texts, the page owner shared at least one post daily, and the page owner shared posts which are encouraged users to participate in the commenting, the page has a high number of followers, the page gets a high number of comments and replies, the page owner has been famous among the daily life Instagrammers. The tools of data acquisition were participant observation for two years and interviews with the page owners. Description and analysis of findings show that Instagrammers who have daily life pages present an ideal image of their lifestyle, condition, and personality which has formed to “I am good” story. These images in the material dimension refer to consumerism as a valuable symbol of upper-class people. Also, there are interconnections between the methods which are used to access satisfaction in daily life. It seems users are searching for ideals in the virtual space because of the inefficiency and deterrence of political and social situations in the real space. Although users choose the virtual space to share their opinions and feelings and experiences optionally, they try to display and protect optimal and trustworthy network image of themselves. According to this, users’ behaviors in some kinds of contexts (challenging topics especially political and religious subjects) imply self-direction. They are trying to show themselves as the right side and another one as the unfair side and they accuse other positions and they curse their opponents. This position is visible in four fields: the challenging macro issues (such as trust in a government official, election, foreign policy, laws related to women, crisis management, betrayal of spouses, Hijab in Islam, limitations of individual freedom in the public arena, street protest, environmental protection), the issues which show differences in lifestyles, the situation of privacy protection, the difference in interpretation. The users can’t keep their polite appearances in those fields. Although, the page owners try to keep calm, but others don’t try it because they are often anonymous, unlike the page owners. In other contexts (such as the critical or landmark conditions) imply to collectivism which is referred to as “networked individualism”. In-group collectivism has been formed based on the image of “I am good and you are good” and it has been visible in narrative contexts of user’s daily life experiences not in discussions of social issues. General collectivism has been appearing in sensitive and difficult situations especially natural disasters and abnormal events or fateful situations to achieve common targets. Users have used the virtual space as a tool for collective movements with a special ability to organize and a context for being seen as a participant.
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