To curate yourself : A qualitative study of the Instagram user's path to self-presentation

Instagram offers many opportunities for people to present themselves, but there is a lot we don’t know about when it comes to the choices people make when they create and share content. In this thesis we look at self-presentation and how it is being constructed on Instagram to provide an increased understanding of how individuals use social media as a tool for self-presentation. We have used qualitative interviews to collect data and a thematic method for analyzing the material. Based on our results, we conclude that users present themselves on Instagram in a variety of ways and in very complicated ways, where in many cases additional platforms and services are used. The rationale behind this behavior is, among other things, that you take cultural and technical filters into consideration, and that you do not see items as something individual, but parts of a larger whole. Another thing that emerged from the study was that curation is an essential part of creating one’s self-presentation