The Construction of an Online Identity  A Case Study of Fashion Blog ‘The Blonde Salad’ and Founder Chiara Ferragni’s Activities on Instagram

Blogging and using social network sites (SNS) have been one of the rising activities of mainstream communication this past decade. Although many such blogs and SNS have been studied by scholars already, the relations between these two and the corresponding developments in the field demands an updated investigation. Our ideal way of communicating is changing rapidly, and bloggers who use the social network site Instagram are a good example of how this affects our online behaviour. Microblogging website Instagram has rapidly become part of mainstream media over the last couple of years since its founding in October 2010. The success of the site is evident, given the 400 million monthly active users who on average share 80 million photographs a day. As a result of their rising popularity, many blogs have spread their content on social networking sites, and especially on Instagram. The type of blog that does so at great length and is studied here is the fashion blog. ‘The Blonde Salad’,...Show moreBlogging and using social network sites (SNS) have been one of the rising activities of mainstream communication this past decade. Although many such blogs and SNS have been studied by scholars already, the relations between these two and the corresponding developments in the field demands an updated investigation. Our ideal way of communicating is changing rapidly, and bloggers who use the social network site Instagram are a good example of how this affects our online behaviour. Microblogging website Instagram has rapidly become part of mainstream media over the last couple of years since its founding in October 2010. The success of the site is evident, given the 400 million monthly active users who on average share 80 million photographs a day. As a result of their rising popularity, many blogs have spread their content on social networking sites, and especially on Instagram. The type of blog that does so at great length and is studied here is the fashion blog. ‘The Blonde Salad’, a very successful fashion blog by Italian Chiara Ferragni is taken as an example as it successfully integrates Instagram in its daily communication with its followers. ‘The Blonde Salad’ has been around since 2009 and has developed into a company with several employees. But since the arrival of Instagram, Chiara Ferragni seems to have become more and more influential as an individual, outshining the blog’s amount of followers of 191.000 with 6.000.000. The aim of this article is, therefore, to answer the research question: How do fashion bloggers create and maintain an online identity on Instagram regarding the theory of the ‘social actor analysis’ (van Leeuwen 1996, Machin and van Leeuwen 2007)? The Literature Review provides for a broad investigation of ‘self-representation’, ‘the Instagram hipster culture’, ‘the fashion blogger identity’ and ‘Chiara Ferragni and ‘The Blonde Salad’. The Method and Results and Discussion sections elaborate on the case study and provide an interpretation of the visual analysis of the Instagram accounts of ‘The Blonde Salad’ and Chiara FerragniShow less

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The Construction of an Online Identity A Case Study of Fashion Blog ‘The Blonde Salad’ and Founder Chiara Ferragni’s Activities on Instagram