Seeing through the ‘filtered’ landscapes of Instagram
Kate Lyons | University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
This paper considers the interplay of physical and digital landscaping in the Mission District (‘the Mission’), a
gentrified neighborhood in San Francisco, California. Aligned with recent work on affect and people’s mediations of the linguistic
landscape (Wee, 2016; Banda & Jimaima, 2015), I examine how the Mission is
filtered – literally and figuratively – in a corpus of 16,756 Instagram posts. Comparing these digital
remediated productions of place to the physical landscape, I demonstrate how both are structured semiotically along exclusionary
lines. Contrary to the democratic and inclusive mythology of digital / social media, I show how users’ self-positionings and
elitist stancetaking (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2009; Mapes, forthcoming) effectively reinscribe privilege and reiterate gentrification of the Mission. As mining of ‘big
data’ becomes increasingly valued as empirically ‘objective’ information, my analysis demonstrates geotagged content should not be
viewed as a static indicator, but as a subjective, dynamic and – at times – problematic process.
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This list is based on CrossRef data as of 5 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
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