Authorship, ownership, and ethics in datafied discourse on Instagram

Abstract

Abstract Datafication, or the translation of our everyday actions into quantifiable metrics, underwrites a wide set of contemporary discursive practices. With a specific focus on the social media platform Instagram, this paper analyzes mediatized landscape signs as ‘datafied discourse’ enmeshed in an entangled apparatus of platforms, algorithms, and online networks. Using a corpus of 404 public Instagram posts gathered from the Café de Flore geotag, I examine how the vernacular practices of geotagging, mediatization, and remediatization reflexively construct this ostensibly ‘user-generated’ landscape. I then consider the implications of these and other discursive practices occurring at the ‘online-offline nexus’ through the dimensions of authorship and ownership. Finally, amid a confluence of new LL work, I propose to orient scholarship toward an ‘infrastructural’ perspective, in which datafication, online platforms, and algorithms are understood to exert considerable influence over our landscapes, thus emerging as relevant to scholars engaged in any genre of LL analysis.

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