I know for the fact that there is limited-to-none study of Instagram (IG) as a non-place (Augé, 1992, p. 122), but I would very much like to treat IG as one, nodding to Bonila’s ethnography towards Twitter’s one particular feature (2015). If Bonila specifically focused on hashtag’s intertextuality and index, in this essay I exclusively wish to address how some theoretical frameworks apply to the infamous finsta fad amongst youth — which I will address later on. For starter, IG’s media structure is filled with plenty mouthwatering features for youth indeed, and by IG structure it’s “…its superior visual sharing capability and archives users’ contents on their profile page, and as such, Instagram users tend to portray creative and ideal-self on this particular platform” (Sheldon & Bryant, 2016). These characteristics are only possible because IG’s structure and commonly shared media ideology to use it as self- expression, social interaction, and escapism medium (Lee et al., 2015; Sheldon & Bryant, 2016).
These, however, along the way do not fulfill the former IG holders need to “ideally truly” use it the way the expected because there is this tendency to “flex” to general audience’s (followers) needs, and that’s one thing to discuss. I found several journals that cover this finstatopic have this tendency to distinguish and compare how finsta differs from rinsta (real IG account, for the lack of term). Even so, I would not go into the comparison discussions, instead I try to discuss how finsta as a media practice play, in Anthropology of Communications lingo.
Finsta is an abbreviation of “fake Insta(-gram account)” and this slang specifically is made and popularized by US people. In Indonesia, we do not have one solid term for an “extension” account; some of us call it just a second, the rest may call it a private acc. For this essay’s sake, I refer any secondary/extension/alternate IG account as finsta. I would not address any finsta that is made to stalk, fangirl/fanboy, or other alternate purposes not correlating to the definition below. There are undoubtedly a wide variety of finsta, thus we need to decode what it takes for an account to be labeled as the “true” finsta. Abrashi (2018) qualifies a finstaby these factors: (1) possessed predominantly (but not limited to) by high school or college women, (2) utilizes the private feature (followers must request access to follow), (3) profile picture and bio are unrelated to the user, and (4) generally have fewer than 100 followers. Again, I proposed the aforementioned definition in order to offer a clearer contextualization on what finsta may be like.
As a matter of fact, there are a lot to cover since finsta itself is highly depending on ourmedia ideologies and this will lead to very long detailed descriptions for each of them only. Aside from the fact that in Indonesia we have our ways of naming it, the way we name it also is a media ideology, since assumptions about how finsta as a medium can execute an ideal communicative task as well as what we believe how finsta affects a message or ought to affect certain messages, like in Gerschon’s case (2015). Accordingly, we may agree that the context of the messages are IG contents (posts and stories). Obviously finsta as a medium shapes the message of the contents, explains how it is “invented” in the first place; which“…isn’t toshare risqué images but simply to have an outlet for posts that might not jibe with the personal brand they are trying to present” (Duffy, 2017). In other words, to “distinguish” an “explicit” content from a general, possessive individualism (Macpeherson, 2010) driven contents — but not limited to. If we use Gell’s paradigm about four kinds of entities (Reed. 2005, pp. 223–228), the “ideal” matching would be: index as the contents. artist as finsta holders, recipient as the followers, and prototype as finsta holder’s “offline” life.
But what is “ideal” often times does not match the reality, does it? In this case, Gell’s framework fails to include how IG’s media structures (features) play a lot. Similar to Reed’s arguments about blogging, IG’s indexes are supposedly the posts and stories, but we can partly or largely know the artist by its timeline that contains indexes. I do not think that recipient is only followers (visitors), since followers do possess the ability to influence the index made byartist, but often times recipient’s possible “responses” are also often only in artist’s head, imagined according to context. This way leads us to the idea that somehow finta holders post contents are either artist and prototype (and recipient!) as they post what they feel, what they think about, their selfies, what is in front of them, etc. in real time, plus they also curate the contents whether they are post-worthy and sometimes will engage their followers in the way that make the holder feel validated by posting — even though it is on finsta. This paradox somewhat takes away the “ideal” ideology of a finsta indeed yet it is more common than we ever intended it to be. In my opinion, it is safe to say that finsta blurs out and intertangles artist,recipient, and index at once. Back to medium as a message, this particular mish-mash offinsta as a platform holds a certain capacity to push a message in which the index relates to the recipient and such are determined by IG’s structure. So which influences index the most? Is it the followers, the finsta holder, or IG’s structure? I do not hold the capacity of answering it yet, unfortunately, since I believe this requires an abundant amount of researches first.
And how does this all play in reality? We know for sure the very premise of finsta is that only a certain, select public is granted the access to view or interact (later be impactful) to the contents (as message as well as discourse) that absolutely would make it to rinsta. The usual select public comprises closest friends, while rinsta’s public comprises broader social network like family, colleague, etc. (Dewar, et al., 2019, p. 4). The sense of privacy, however, is not as what holders might intend — due to the participatory capacity of aforementionedrecipient, like the possibility of “…taking a screenshot of a post and showing others this supposedly private content” (Malouf, 2018, p. 2) and more. But nevertheless, despite everything, the significant matter to notice is that how these display a public making process.
The public making process can be seen in how we curate our public a.k.a. our followers, but which one? According to Warner (2002) are two kinds of it: a public and the public. The earlier one is an imaginary community where the presence of the members do not matter (that much), for instance if we follow and watch a selebgram’s stories we are immediately included in a public of the selebgram. The public, on the other hand, is formed from a community that is bordered by a shared space and a shared discourse hence the community’s presence is needed to keep the discourse alive. Instead of putting into dichotomy, maybe finsta followers are a transition of a public to the public? In this context, a public is the follower — because it is automatically considered as once the since we are accepted as a follower, not that we affect the artist’s index whatsoever by our presence as their public. Then, over time it is common to see a growth in followers number make the artist consider to “re- curate” their contents (discourse) already supposedly non-curated space, this way we see how followers alternate a public into the public of a finsta because of it’s ability to be the artist,recipient, and also index at the same time. Though it should be noted that Warner himself said that the debate regarding publics is up to the addresser or (main) artist, in this case, the finstaholder and the followers, whether consider themselves as a part of a series of contents and take part in “co-creating” it or not, it is all unconscious (how close we are, our personalities, and such). Hence, IG as a media structure can also define public making among all actors.
References
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Augé, M. (2008). Non-places: Introduction to an anthropology of supermodernity, p. 122. London: Verso.
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Dewar, S. et al. (2019). Finsta: Creating “Fake” Spaces for Authentic Performance, pp. 1–6. Berkeley: UC Berkeley School of Information.
Duffy, B. E. (2017). The trend of fake Instagram accounts exposes the troubling way that work is taking over our lives. Big Brother. New York: Comm. Dept. of Cornell University.
Lee, E., Lee, J. A., Moon, J. H., & Sung, Y. (2015). Pictures speak louder than words: Motivations for using Instagram. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 18, pp. 552–556.
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Warner, M. (2002). Publics and Counterpublics. New York: Zone Books.
