Socialización digital y creatividad audiovisual: construcción social de la imagen a través de Instagram

Our digital world is increasingly visual. Mobile applications focused on digital photography such as Instagram are vehicles for the creation, manipulation and instant diffusion of images. Instagram is therefore an open window to research in Social Sciences and Digital Humanities, and an opportunity to investigate how young users of this application develop visual culture in their local environments through global visual languages. The present work analyzes the production of Instagram in Granada from a sample of 955.564 publications and 375.758 published and geolocated images collected over a year (between April 2017 and 2018), with the aim of showing how it is socially constructed the image of a city. The geographic analysis, social networks and content of the study sample has allowed to establish which are the main focuses of visual attraction of the city, as well as the neighborhoods and districts most active in Instagram; the most relevant members of a user network that is self-constructed in a heterogeneous and open manner, with strong intermediary nodes of “instagramist” style and that connect subcommunities; as well as the widespread use of the application both for business promotion and for the development of individual creativity. All this illustrates how the Instagram publications in Granada make visible the importance and incidence of fundamental aspects for the city such as tourism, converting the data generated into a showcase of the image of the city and the construction of visual culture at a local level.