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Influencer Discourse: Affective relations and identities
Edited by Pilar Garcés-Conejos Blitvich and Alexandra Georgakopoulou
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 349] 2024
► pp. 233–255

Chapter 9
Social media influencers and #DigitalDetoxDay

A multimodal discourse analysis of an Instagram anti-stigma mental health campaign

| Masaryk University
This paper presents a case study of an anti-stigma mental health campaign called Digital Detox Day, which was first organised in 2020 with the aim of encouraging people not to use social media for one day. Despite foregrounding the positive effects of digital detox, the campaign was paradoxically promoted by social media influencers (SMIs), whose popularity is contingent on an active online presence. To explore how SMIs position themselves in relation to the campaign and digital detox, a multimodal discourse analysis of 100 Instagram posts with the hashtag #DigitalDetoxDay was conducted. Having examined the functions of the multimodal semiotic resources adopted by the SMIs in this data, the paper shows that the #DigitalDetoxDay posts afford the SMIs’ self-presentation authenticity and relatability and thus do not disrupt but corroborate the characteristic image of SMIs.
Keywords: Instagram, self-presentation, multimodal discourse analysis, mental health, digital detox, influencers, authenticity, relatability, intimacy
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Previous research
  • 3.Self-presentation of SMIs and research questions
  • 4.Data and procedure
  • 5.Analysis
    • 5.1(1): What multimodal semiotic resources are exploited by SMIs in the #DigitalDetoxDay posts on Instagram?
      • 5.1.1Visual resources
      • 5.1.2Linguistic resources
    • 5.2(2): What role do the identified resources play with respect to the SMIs’ self-presentation on Instagram?
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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