Instapoetry as a post-digital phenomenon

The infrastructural effects of platformization on contemporary pop poetry

Abstract

This article-based dissertation investigates the cultural phenomenon of instapoetry as platformized pop poetry. This involves investigating exactly how and in what way instapoetry is bound to the digital social media platform Instagram by approaching the platform as a media ecology for instapoetry, as well as how it is interlocking, overlapping, and interacting with other media ecologies. This provides an opportunity to study both the effects of the platform’s infrastructure and the platform as infrastructure. The study applies a mixed methods digital humanities approach to answer the main research question: How can we understand instapoetry as a post-digital cultural phenomenon? Instapoetry is situated in the post-digital. Platformization is a particular articulation of the postdigital, and much research has gone into investigating the platformization of contemporary cultural production. At the same time, the distributional turn in the humanities, an infrastructuralist and materialist re-orientation in the study of the storage, transmission, and interpretation of culture, has shown the need to account for the effects which media infrastructures, as they are what position and shape agents, objects and processes in media ecosystems of cultural production. Supported by an extensive data collection of Scandinavian instapoetry in the form of ca. 35 000 Instagram posts and their metadata, the dissertation provides a new entry point into the phenomenon. The first article of the dissertation analyses the materials found in the tagged platform archives of the well-known Norwegian instapoet Trygve Skaug. In accounting for how instapoetry is bound to Instagram, the article contributes with a conceptualization of the post-digital distribution process of instapoetry as a defining trait of how instapoetry moves on, off, and through the platform. The article contributes by outlining a particular genre of instapoetry: the instalyric. This is a lyric made for the type of repetition activated by the distributional processes of Instagram. The second article, co-written with Dr. Eleonora Ravizza, concerns curation, canonization, and access to data. We argue that algorithmic curation on social media platforms makes specific works more visible than others by a different selection process than what is the case for literature and other types of art in other cultural ecosystems. This influences the choice of objects to study. We argue that a fruitful way to bypass this is to collect and investigate large data sets. However, when this is stopped by the platform companies, this has severe implications for studying phenomena that exist digitally on these platforms. The third article is an exploration of the phenomenon through the extensive collected data collection scraped from Instagram. Here, aggregated patterns are made manifest, and a visual network analysis of a hashtag co-occurrence network provides knowledge on topics and themes, as well as where instapoetry exists on Instagram. The findings from this article provide a basis for the selection of the instapoet accounts examined in the fourth article. The fourth article investigates the platformed practices related to instapoetry by asking when a poet is an instapoet. Socio-technical processes are investigated to provide a basis for understanding what platformed relations exist between the poet, platform, and audience. The article argues for understanding the instapoet as a specific role a poet can have that goes beyond using Instagram as a marketing tool and instead place it in closer connection with platformed participatory culture. Combined, the articles demonstrate that instapoetry is a particular articulation of the post-digital in the form of platformized poetry. The different articulations of platform dependency and platform specificity that come with being platformized are used to develop a theorization of instapoetry as pop poetry, which relies on Instagram for distribution and circulation. This dissertation contributes to the study of contemporary pop poetry and to the important field of culture organization, where the study of how something is organized also means accounting for how it shapes what it organizes.