Project goals

People’s perception, emotion, and social interaction with respect to the environment are an important topic for living in the City (Dunkel.A, 2015). While the perception and people’s lived experience may seem to be abstract, the emergence of new digital platforms has made us understand it in new ways (Pink, 2016). Visual content people post on social media can offer to fill the gap and visualise the “generalised mental picture” (Lynch, 1960). In this project, I choose Instagram, an almost entirely visual platform, not only to study the perception and living experience for a specific group of people, but also to explore how their connections between online contents and offline life is generated from an anthropological perspective.

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There appeared the trend that postings on social media platforms have become increasingly visual( Miller, 2016), which makes it inevitable to look at visual contents if I want to conduct my ethnography work on social media. In this project, I look at Chinese students that newly moved to London and their experience of living in this city. I generally examined 5 Chinese students’ Instagram accounts and particularly focus on two Chinese students. While both of these two people came from similar culture background and started to live here from September 2016, their Instagram accounts are used in very different ways, in which we can understand their experience of the environment around them by looking at the patterns of their lives indicated by Instagram posts. More details of their accounts as well as conversations about their lives will be demonstrated on their individual pages.

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Selected methodologies

Instagram photos

I use Instagram photos mainly for two purposes. First of all, photos from my informants’ accounts are part of the most important ethnographic data in my study. I scanned 5 people’s Instagram accounts and generally examined 150 pictures. In particular, I analysed the content of every picture on the two major informats accounts. Secondly, inspired by Cavin (1994), who considered the use of camera rather than photos themselves as research data, I asked my two informants to pick about “the most representative” eight pictures from their accounts as narratives of their lives in London. They also explained contents in the pictures as well as the reason of their choices in the recording.

 

Semi-structured interview

With each of my informants, I have done interviews for two times, focusing on their offline lives experience in London and their perceptions of this city. Besides, I talked about their posts with them. Because some pictures don’t have any text description, they also gave me some contextual information that lied behind posts.

 

Participant observation

Based on the data I gleaned from Instagram and interviews, I decided to conduct participant observation with two informants in different context. While both of them study in London, one of them presents his life selectively online and another one reflects her life online quite authentically. Thus, I did participant observation with @yuzhao_huang in his work and on his way back home after work, which was the part not presented on his account. As for @daisydo1229, I did participant observation when she was at school and on her way commuting between home and school.

 

Navigating this website

Given the trait of Instagram, I have used an image-based structure in this Wix site. The two entries both in the menu and on the home page cover the two informants in my project. Each of these two pages has three parts. They are constructed in the same order as my ethnography: digital ethnography, interviews and participant observation. On the page “Discussion” I scanned other three Chinese students account and talked about the patterns I discerned as well as some thoughts on carrying out my ethnography for the first time.

 

Discussions and Reflexivity 

While @daisydo1229 posts pictures more randomly and rather for herself than for other visitors, @yuzhao_huang uses Instagram for a very clear purpose and presents his online image very carefully. Interestingly, neither of my main informants used Instagram when I conducted participant observation. Because @daisydo1229 only posts things “worth to remember” (her words) and @yuzhao_huang excludes working experience of his life from Instagram. Even though they use Instagram in a specific way and only post certain things, we can still understand many things about their living experience in London.

 

By looking further in the post history, we can see that when @yuzhao_huang just moved to London, the theme and layout of his posts are not as strictly organised as now. The change of contents takes place alongside the change of his life. From his study at school and interaction with other people in art industry, he started to use Instagram in a more “professional” way. As for @daisydo1229, to some extent her account tells us a lot about her life. Food, her major related objects, landmarks are main themes of her content. Two informants have used Instagram in very different ways, which implicates two kinds of living experience. This point was proved in the interviews as they used very different words depicting their lives and feelings. By looking at other Chinese student’s Instagram accounts, similar themes can also be found to understand their lives. However, to be more accurate, I think ethnographical researches moving across online and offline worlds (Hjorth and Pink, 2014) should be done to understand lived experience.

 

To be reflective, on informants’ pages, I try to present their Instagram accounts as unmediated contents for audience to explore. However, this is not necessarily authentic as the interface is different form Instagram and maybe the meaning is also mediated when audiences look their accounts in this context. Secondly, in the interviews, I suggested my informants to make a selection of their photos because from visual objects could reveal how they understand their own experience (Pink, 2001) and knowledge of lives in London, I was aware that they might choose pictures only because they believed that’s what I wanted them to choose. For example, @yuzhao_huang did pick one photo and explained that’s the sad moment of his living experience in London. 

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References

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Cavin, E. 1994. In search of the viewfinder: A study of a child's perspective. Visual Sociology, 9 (1): p. 27-41.

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Dunkel, A. (2015). Visualizing the perceived environment using crowdsourced photo geodata. Landscape and Urban Planning, 142, 173–186. http://doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2015.02.022

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Hjorth, L., & Pink, S. (2014). New visualities and the digital wayfarer: Reconceptualizing camera phone photography and locative media. Mobile Media & Communication, 2(1), 40–57. http://doi.org/10.1177/2050157913505257

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Lynch, K. (1960, June 14). The Image of the City. Retrieved from https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/image-city

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Miller, D. (2016). Social media in an English village: Or how to keep people at just the right distance. London: UCL Press.

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Pink, S. (2001). Doing visual ethnography: images, media and representation in research. London: Sage.

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Pink, S. (2016). Digital ethnography: principles and practice. Los Angles: Sage.