While social media is communal by definition, the use, regulation and understanding of social media is frequently limited to individuals (even if those individuals add together as a group or community of some kind). In this paper, we...
moreWhile social media is communal by definition, the use, regulation and understanding of social media is frequently limited to individuals (even if those individuals add together as a group or community of some kind). In this paper, we detail an attempt to examine how the visual social media app and platform Instagram is used to imagine the relationships with those who have no self-representational agency: babies and the recently deceased. Specifically, the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months in 2014. The aim is to utilise this mapping to investigate how relationships appear in visual form, and what these then say about these dynamics are presented visually, and are thus imagined, by Instagram users.