Instagram as Location Producer

Some authors (Pan, Lee, & Tsai, 2014; Urry, 1990) have argued that tourism is fundamentally related to visual experiences, which are central to the construction of travel memories. To Crawshaw and Urry (1997), visual consumption has become one of the dominant ways in which societies intersect with their environments. Which is why it is important to understand how people use Instagram to narrate their trips through posts composed by images, captions, tags, emoticons, likes and comments. Via ethnographic interviews and participant observation, this research sheds light on the techniques people are using on Instagram to perform their travels and produce locations. In addition, increasingly more people are using Instagram to plan their trips. They look for hashtags and geotags of places they want to visit for inspiration on restaurants, neighbourhoods, etc. They also use the platform to interact with people who have been to a place, to ask for recommendations. Besides composing a personal journey, the use of hashtags and geotags connects posts and this creates threads that form a broader stream that visually narrates a place. I argue that this is a kind of location producing. One that bypasses the official production, such as paid advertisement, with an aura of more authentic and personal recommendations. This paper seeks to comprehend how visual narratives on Instagram connect to spaces and the role this practice plays in shaping narratives associated with places.