Unıversity Students' Presentation of Self on Instagram

This study is based on Instagram, an interactive social media network for visual posting created with Web 2.0 technology. The practices of university students who are active Instagram users were examined in this study from the symbolic interactionist perspective, mainly within the framework of Erving Goffman's concept of presentation of self. Practices are discussed in relation with concepts such as pleasure, seeing forms, carnivalesque, mirror stage, scopophilia and voyeurism. Concepts such as actor, front, role, impression and performance were used in the context of Goffman's presentation of self. In this study where the fictional posting was problematized, an in-depth interview was conducted with 11 participants who are students at Mersin University and data were collected on the Instagram experience of the participants. Analyzed by the instrumental case study, this data shed light on social media, user interaction environments and the design of the posts. In addition to these, a dictionary describing the terms related to Instagram has been created. Results show that the users spend time to design their posts and get pleasure from being seen, striving to exhibit impeccable performance on the Instagram scene, being meticulous designers and paying attention to their visibility in their profiles. Receiving comments and being appreciated and watched, in users' interactions with others are found to be rather valuable, resulting in emotional fulfillment of the user in these situations, and users may sometimes post experiences that differ from the reality at the backstage. It has also been determined that the users spend their time on this medium regularly to receive only the likes or views, and that they enter mutual like and follow practices to raise the number of likes or followers