A fun, active and sociable life on display – nursing home presentations on Instagram

Abstract

Swedish nursing homes' use of Instagram has increased vastly in the past few years. Instagram is understood as a means to manage the image they wish to mediate to the public. This article examines what is displayed in the nursing homes' Instagram accounts, and what kind of reality is thereby constructed. The data consist of  Instagram images from four nursing homes' Instagram accounts. It is found that nursing home life is primarily depicted on Instagram as active, sociable and fun, with informal, friendly relations between staff and residents, and residents able to continue to live as before, if not better, and to interact with surrounding society. Frailty, boredom, loneliness and death were absent from the data, as were mundane care activities. The article concludes that the presentations in the Instagram accounts challenge the traditional idea of nursing homes as total institutions, and the decline and loss associated with living in such institutions; however, there is a risk that these idyllic presentations conceal the inherent problems of nursing home life.

Online representations of nursing-home life in Sweden: perspectives from staff on content, purpose and audience

“…An issue of particular interest is whether representations were described as mirroring images of nursing-home life ( see Carlstedt, 2019). Websites and Facebook and Instagram accounts were described as having the same audience, but differing in style and content.…”

“…These daily doings, however, did not include ordinary tasks such as preparing meals, dispensing medicine or making beds; rather, interviewees said that they wanted to show ‘what's fun’, with residents visiting museums, playing bingo, having their nails done, participating in a traditional crayfish dinner, having Christmas or Nobel Prize parties, or marking any number of thematic days (International Women's Day, Cinnamon Bun Day, Waffle Day, etc .) that nursing homes like to celebrate ( see Carlstedt, 2019).…”

“…As Erlandsson (2014) suggests, this is done with the selection of content and the way various audiences are addressed. In an earlier study, one of the authors of this article found that Instagram accounts of Swedish nursing homes showed residents involved in an active and enjoyable social life (Carlstedt, 2019). This article examines how nursing-home staff account for these types of representations of old age.…”

“…Many nursing homes have an online presence, often in the form of a website and/or social media accounts such as Facebook and Instagram, which they use to broadcast information about their premises, staff, services and nursing-home activities ( see Erlandsson, 2014; Carlstedt, 2019). Online representations of eldercare services can be studied as a documentation practice that communicates normative ideas about care – its content, relations and subject positions of those involved.…”

Doing the Unknown: Spa Activities in Nursing Homes

“…As with the Instagram post about face packs, only residents' hands are visible in the photos. By describing the activity in terms of "glitter and glamour," life at Seaview Lodge is contrasted to traditional images of nursing homes, which are typically associated with boredom, decline, and death (Gubrium 1975;Hicks 2000;Whitaker 2004;Carlstedt forthcoming). The distance from such grey ordinariness was something that characterized indexical expressions for spa in general.…”