Tracking the body and the self through Instagram

This research will explore how and why Instagram is used by women, within online fitness communities, to track the self through an analysis of digital practices in relation to their potential to produce material and discursive elements of the self. In utilising empirical data and Foucault's (1982; 1988) work regarding technologies of the self, this research will explore the ways we are able to apply theoretical work about the self to recent technological practices. Thus, I will contribute to digital sociology to explore how digital practices may influence the production of the self, and why they are taken up. This is an important contribution as new media research typically focuses on what people do, rather than why digital practices are done and to what effect (Brock, 2016). Self-tracking practices are on the rise (Till, 2014), with literature focusing on technologies that produce quantified data about the self (Lupton, 2016). This research is unique as it will explore how women track the self through Instagram, through images and captions rather than solely numbers, and in the way it will draw upon Heyes (2006) to explore how this digital practice may be construed as a technology of the self. Doing so will allow a nuanced analysis of the simultaneous and contradictory positive and negative effects self-tracking may have in producing and understanding the self, in addition to exploring why it is (or is not) practiced. This goes beyond current literature which theorises self-tracking as constraining (Willliamson, 2015) or enabling (Fox, 2013). Research on Instagram is dominated by content analysis (Smith and Sanderson, 2015), experimental and quantitative studies (Tiggeman and Zicardo, 2015) that do not address Instagram users directly. I argue such methods lack an ability to explore how discourse operates through and on Instagram. In addition, there are implications when we address the relationships between the self, body and new media without including the voices of the researched, or situating it in theory (Perloff, 2014). This research is novel, then, as it will address Instagram posts and engage with users to come to a fuller understanding of the practices of self-tracking. Research questions 1) How, and in what ways, are women using Instagram to track the self? 1a) Why are they using Instagram to track the self? 1b) How, and in what ways, are particular discourses being drawn upon within the posts? 2) What role do online fitness communities play in the practice of self-tracking through Instagram? 3) How can the practice of self-tracking through Instagram be viewed as a technology of the self? Methods Following feminist methodology (Oakley, 1981; Pillow and Mayo, 2012), I will conduct unstructured interviews with women to produce a richer understanding of experience. I will draw on Rose (2008) to produce a discourse analysis of the Instagram posts of these women. In combining the two I will contribute to a new era of online research that does not divide the 'real' and the 'virtual' (Rogers, 2013), but actively acknowledges and explores the ways in which the two may act, purposefully or not, upon and with each other in producing the self. Timeline Year 1-Literature review, ethical approval, upgrade to full PhD status. Make contact with participants. Year 2-Fieldwork Year 3-Write findings, submit thesis. Research Contributions This research will contribute to digital sociology whilst being theoretically situated in a feminist and Foucauldian framework, to understand how technological practices may have implications for the self. It will contribute to innovations in methods through combining theory, digital data analysis and interview data to come to a richer understanding of self-tracking. It will have impact in addressing what may be at stake when we utilise Instagram to self-track, in relation to its material and discursive effects, contributing to critical digital literacy awareness.