Abstract

This proposal emerges from Sartori’s postulate about the primacy of the image. On the basis of this initial idea, the transcendence of the visual image is acknowledged in the perception of the political scene. The objective is to apply this idea to the social network Instagram. We study the conjunction between visual and verbal framing in the content published by five candidates for the presidency of the Government of Spain; data retrieval began with the call for elections in 2015 and continued until the final inauguration session in October 2016. Our study aims to verify a hypothesis centered on the fact that leaders share videos and photographs to humanize their figure. Furthermore, the content analysis of 885 images reveals a growing process of celebrification of politicians active in Instagram, allowing for the discovery of dichotomies that operate in such a process.

Abstract

Although the phenomenon of the sexualization of children has prompted numerous investigations in recent years, very few have studied how adults perceive it, and none has studied the sexualization of girls in photographs in social networks. This work demonstrates, from the results of a structured online survey of 353 people, that the sexualization of girls in social networks generates perceptions that undervalue girls in intellectual, social, and moral aspects. Such perceptions depend on media consumption level, degree of self-objectification, and people’s religiosity.

Abstract

Our digital world is increasingly visual. Mobile applications focused on digital photography such as Instagram are vehicles for the creation, manipulation and instant diffusion of images. Instagram is therefore an open window to research in Social Sciences and Digital Humanities, and an opportunity to investigate how young users of this application develop visual culture in their local environments through global visual languages. The present work analyzes the production of Instagram in Granada from a sample of 955.564 publications and 375.758 images published and geolocated over a year (between April 2017 and April 2018), with the aim of showing how the image of a city is socially constructed. The geographical, social network, and content analysis of the study sample has allowed to establish which are the main focal points of visual attraction of the city, as well as the most active neighborhoods and districts; the most relevant members of a user network that is self-constructed in a heterogeneous and open manner, with strong intermediary nodes of an “instagramist” style that connect subcommunities; as well as the widespread use of the application both for business promotion and for the development of individual creativity. All this indicates how the Instagram publications in Granada make visible the importance and incidence of tourism in the city.