Studying Instagram beyond selfies

Of approximately 40 billion photos posted on Instagram, only 282 million are selfies—just 0.7%. Thus, for all its zeitgeisty appeal, the selfie is in fact a niche phenomenon in the larger context of Instagram genres. Noting this fact, we identified an opportunity to engage with scholars from all over the world with the challenge of proposing new theories and approaches capable of unlocking the full socio-anthropological potential of Instagram. As the articles collected in this special issue testify, Instagram has an enormous impact on people’s everyday lives on many levels—socially, culturally, economically, and politically—and so, indubitably, it deserves rigorous academic attention. Given the scale and complexity of these impacts, studying Instagram poses different kinds of challenges and many gaps are still to be filled. With this special issue we don’t claim to resolve all the issues noted above. More modestly, our goal is to kick-start a fruitful conversation among social media scholars interested in furthering Instagram studies.

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