Lifestyle Enclaves in the Instagram City?

Abstract

Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both urban dwellers and social media users tend to form assortative social ties, so the reasoning goes, identity-based divisions are fortified and polarization is exacerbated in digital and urban spaces. Drawing on a dataset of 34.4 million interactions among Amsterdam Instagram users over half a year, this article seeks to gauge the level of fragmentation that occurs at the interface of digital and urban spaces. We find some evidence for fragmentation: users form clusters based on shared tastes and leisure activities, and these clusters are embedded in four distinct lifestyle zones at the interface of social media and the city. However, we also find connections that span divisions. Similarly, places that are tagged by Instagram users generally include a heterogeneity of clusters. While there is evidence that Instagram users sort into groups, there is no evidence that these groups are isolated from one another. In fact, our findings suggest that Instagram enables ties across different groups and mitigates against particularity and idiosyncrasy. These findings have important implications for how we should understand and study social media in the context of everyday life. Scholars should not only look for evidence of division through standard network analytic techniques like community detection, but also allow for countervailing tendencies.

Filtering feminisms: Emergent feminist visibilities on Instagram

“…The data consist of semi-structured interviews with feminist Instagram users. We found 12 initial interviewees by querying data gathered via the erstwhile Instagram API on users who had geotagged posts to either Amsterdam or Copenhagen between 1 December 2015 and 30 May 2016 (see Boy and Uitermark 2016, 2017, 2020). The API allowed registered developers to request data from Instagram for purposes laid out in their terms of service.…”

Translating the nation through the sustainable, liveable city: The role of social media intermediaries in immigrant integration in Copenhagen

“…While some see social media, and in particular Instagram, as enforcing a certain conformity (e.g. Schep, 2017, in Boy and Uitermark, 2020), in the Scandinavian and Latourian conceptualisation every translation is unique, producing a ‘continuous transformation’ of the world (Latour, 1986: 268, in Waeraas and Nielsen, 2016: 238).…”

Geographical Network Analysis

“… 2021 ), economic agglomerations (Van Meeteren et al . 2016 ), urban subcultures (Boy & Uitermark 2017 , 2020 ) and social movements (Van Haperen et al . 2018 ).…”