The production of space through transmediated identity practices: Spatial self in Instagram at Mavibahçe Shopping Centre in İzmir

Abstract

Widespread use of locative media and its integration with social media applications has provided individuals with the new ways of identity practices. Through checking in at locations, uploading still and moving images of/with certain spaces, and adding hashtags to proliferate meanings, space has turned into a stage where self-identities are digitally practiced. Within this context, this article explores the production of space through these practices on Instagram in the case study of Mavibahçe Shopping Center in Izmir, Turkey. The analysis based on questionnaires and digital media surveys targets the converged space of the same digital and physical location of Mavibahçe with the aim of providing insights into the use of space for identity constructions. The study concludes that visitors reproduce space through transmediated identity practices in Instagram in order to demonstrate their affiliations to certain lifestyles as part of their digital habitus. While they perform these acts, they prefer to use the spatial attributes that they favor as the background setting of their spatial self and tag only affirmative hashtags for their spatial experiences along with these representations, which reproduce the space of the chosen architectural settings in the digital media.

Digital reproducibility in locative media: Atatürk, his mother and women’s rights monument, İzmir

“…This augmentation in digital technologies transforms, if not revolutionizes, acts of reproducing space. Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı (2021: 208) claims that ‘the convergence of physical and digital space through locational data at particular geotags on social media’ provided individuals with more opportunities to reproduce spaces with their own “images and symbols.”’…”

“…These digital reproductions utilize both the physical monument and its location tag to endorse one’s presence in locative media. As Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı (2021: 200) assert, ‘[m]anaging what to present on social media, where to check in, and what to share about a space are new ways of identity practices’. According to them, individuals carefully tailor the spatial aspects of their Instagram posts according to the social norms of the groups that they prefer to be included (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2021: 208).…”

“…As Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı (2021: 200) assert, ‘[m]anaging what to present on social media, where to check in, and what to share about a space are new ways of identity practices’. According to them, individuals carefully tailor the spatial aspects of their Instagram posts according to the social norms of the groups that they prefer to be included (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2021: 208). The abundance of tailored content on the location tag shows that the converged space produced around the monument is one of the spaces where individual users perform their ‘new ways of identity practices’ and purposely become part of visitors’ selfies and distant poses (see Figure 10).…”

Transforming the Doctoral Defence: Remote-Access Technologies and Social Space

“…The analytical strength of Lefebvre's framework comes from the notion of the spatial triad. Its distinction between three dimensions that together produce space enables an understanding of the complexities of social life in various settings, ranging from a theatre company's performance of Shakespeare's Richard III (Watkins, 2005) to digitally mediated spaces: virtual reality in museums (Parker & Saker, 2020), the gig economy (Newlands, 2021), platformed hospitality spaces (Farmaki et al, 2020), geolocation tagging (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2021) and digital navigation (Chesher, 2012). Though we strive not to oversimplify Lefebvre's multi-layered theoryagainst which many caution (e.g., Kingma et al, 2018) social space can be said to be co-produced by mental representations of space, sensory inputs about the concrete materiality of space and the subjective experience of space.…”

What is remembered lives: Time and the disruptive animacy of archiving AIDS on Instagram

“…Geotagging attaches exact spatial coordinates to posts, either by the platform automatically or the user manually. By tagging their locations users, scholars suggest, are creating new identity practices (Yılmaz and Kocabalkanlı, 2019) and social memory (Drakopoulou, 2017: 2), and engaging in performativity (Mendelson and Papacharissi, 2011: 256), sociality (Papacharissi, 2011), or narcissism (Lovink, 2007). @theaidsmemorial routinely geotags cities, states, and physical AIDS memorials.…”