"Instagrammable" Italy: Hyperreal Photography on Social Media

"Instagrammable" Italy: Hyperreal photography on social media This diploma thesis is dedicated to the phenomenon of authenticity and truthfulness of retouched digital travel photography on the social network Instagram. Social network users create a series of simulations and cause a shift of the meanings in the image by using predefined filters, masks, and other post-production techniques that transform the interpretation of reality to the point where they ultimately create hyperreality. According to Barthes, the literal meaning of the message is always accompanied by a connotation, while the two components of the message cannot be separated. In many cases, the connotations are inserted into the visual content by the creators themselves in order to achieve their purpose. In the analytical part of this work I focus on selected "instagrammable" travel photographs, which gradually lose contact with first-order reality due to interventions in the image and a shift of meanings and contexts. The aim of this work is to show how hyperreality is built in specific travel photographs that bloggers share on Instagram and what is actually required of travel photographs shared on a social network. Keywords: cyber-photography, post-production, Instagram, hyperreality, simulacru