Random, Messy, Funny, Raw: Finstas as Intimate Reconfigurations of Social Media

Among many young people, the creation of a finsta-a portmanteau of "fake" and "Instagram" which describes secondary Instagram accounts-provides an outlet to share emotional, low-quality, or indecorous content with their close friends. To study why people create and maintain finstas, we conducted a qualitative study through interviews with finsta users and content analysis of video bloggers exposing their finsta on YouTube. We found that one way that young people deal with mounting social pressures is by reconfiguring online platforms and changing their purposes, norms, expectations, and currencies. Carving out smaller spaces accessible only to close friends allows users the opportunity for a more unguarded, vulnerable, and unserious performance. Drawing on feminist theory, we term this process intimate reconfiguration. Through this reconfiguration finsta users repurpose an existing and widely-used social platform to create opportunities for more meaningful and reciprocal forms of social support.

[1]  Sandy Ross.  Human‐Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions – By Lucy A. Suchman , 2007 .

[2]  Nancy Fraser.  Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy , 2016, Public Space Reader.

[3]  B. Rimé.  Emotion Elicits the Social Sharing of Emotion: Theory and Empirical Review , 2009 .

[4]  Lilly C. Irani,et al.  Chasing Innovation , 2019 .

[5]  O. Robinson.  Sampling in Interview-Based Qualitative Research: A Theoretical and Practical Guide , 2014 .

[6]  Hui-Tzu Grace Chou,et al.  "They Are Happier and Having Better Lives than I Am": The Impact of Using Facebook on Perceptions of Others' Lives , 2012, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[7]  David R. Millen,et al.  Identity management: multiple presentations of self in facebook , 2007, GROUP.

[8]  Ian Alexander,et al.  An introduction to qualitative research , 2000, Eur. J. Inf. Syst..

[9]  Nazanin Andalibi,et al.  Sensitive Self-disclosures, Responses, and Social Support on Instagram: The Case of #Depression , 2017, CSCW.

[10]  Danah Boyd,et al.  I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience , 2011, New Media Soc..

[11]  Munmun De Choudhury,et al.  Mental Health Discourse on reddit: Self-Disclosure, Social Support, and Anonymity , 2014, ICWSM.

[12]  Xuan Zhao,et al.  The many faces of facebook: experiencing social media as performance, exhibition, and personal archive , 2013, CHI.

[13]  Munmun De Choudhury,et al.  Understanding Social Media Disclosures of Sexual Abuse Through the Lenses of Support Seeking and Anonymity , 2016, CHI.

[14]  Patti M. Valkenburg,et al.  Norms of online expressions of emotion: Comparing Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and WhatsApp , 2017, New Media Soc..

[15]  Lilly Irani,et al.  “Design Thinking”: Defending Silicon Valley at the Apex of Global Labor Hierarchies , 2018 .

[16]  R. Shamir,et al.  The age of responsibilization: on market-embedded morality , 2008 .

[17]  Rosalind Gill,et al.  Aesthetic Labour: Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism , 2017 .

[18]  M. Hunt,et al.  No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression , 2018, Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology.

[19]  Emily Weinstein,et al.  The social media see-saw: Positive and negative influences on adolescents’ affective well-being , 2018, New Media Soc..

[20]  W. Brown.  Neo-liberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy , 2003 .

[21]  Margunn Aanestad,et al.  The Camera as an Actor Design-in-Use of Telemedicine Infrastructure in Surgery , 2003, Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW).

[22]  M. Six Silberman,et al.  Stories We Tell About Labor: Turkopticon and the Trouble with "Design" , 2016, CHI.

[23]  J. Gilbert.  What Kind of Thing is ‘Neoliberalism’? , 2013 .

[24]  A. Tsing,et al.  The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins , 2017 .

[25]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Friendster and publicly articulated social networking , 2004, CHI EA '04.

[26]  Oliver L. Haimson.  Social Media as Social Transition Machinery , 2018, Proc. ACM Hum. Comput. Interact..

[27]  Philip E. Agre,et al.  Reinventing Technology, Rediscovering Community: Critical Explorations of Computing as a Social Practice , 1997 .

[28]  S. Merriam.  Qualitative research in practice : examples for discussion and analysis , 2002 .

[29]  Edmund F. Byrne,et al.  Democracy and Difference: Contesting the Boundaries of the Political , 1999 .

[30]  K. Erickson.  Intimate Labors: Cultures, Technologies, and the Politics of Care , 2011 .

[31]  Peter Buxmann,et al.  Envy on Facebook: A Hidden Threat to Users' Life Satisfaction? , 2013, Wirtschaftsinformatik.

[32]  Anna Lauren Hoffmann,et al.  Constructing and enforcing "authentic" identity online: Facebook, real names, and non-normative identities , 2016, First Monday.

[33]  B. Mannheim,et al.  Here's how to do it , 1997, Current Biology.

[34]  Lisa Cosgrove,et al.  The poison in the cure: Neoliberalism and contemporary movements in mental health , 2018, Theory & Psychology.

[35]  A. Joinson.  Self‐disclosure in computer‐mediated communication: The role of self‐awareness and visual anonymity , 2001 .

[36]  Ingrid Erickson,et al.  The Expression of Emotions on Instagram , 2018, SMSociety.

[37]  Niloufar Salehi,et al.  Finsta: Creating "Fake" Spaces for Authentic Performance , 2019, CHI Extended Abstracts.

[38]  F. R. Farmer,et al.  The lessons of Lucasfilm's habitat , 1991 .

[39]  A. Kanai.  On not taking the self seriously: Resilience, relatability and humour in young women’s Tumblr blogs , 2019 .

[40]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[41]  Susan Bordo.  Twilight Zones , 2023 .

[42]  Rosalind Gill,et al.  Beauty surveillance: The digital self-monitoring cultures of neoliberalism , 2018 .

[43]  Lynn Dombrowski,et al.  Digital Footprints and Changing Networks During Online Identity Transitions , 2016, CHI.

[44]  Karen Barad,et al.  Five. Getting Real: Technoscientific Practices and the Materialization of Reality , 1998 .

[45]  Elizabeth F. Churchill,et al.  Faceted identity, faceted lives: social and technical issues with being yourself online , 2011, CSCW.

[46]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Performing a Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World , 2018, J. Comput. Mediat. Commun..

[47]  Lucy A. Suchman,et al.  Working relations of technology production and use , 1993, Computer Supported Cooperative Work.

[48]  B. Hogan.  The Presentation of Self in the Age of Social Media: Distinguishing Performances and Exhibitions Online , 2010 .

[49]  Danah Boyd,et al.  Profiles as Conversation: Networked Identity Performance on Friendster , 2006, Proceedings of the 39th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'06).

[50]  Ron Wakkary,et al.  The resourcefulness of everyday design , 2007, C&C '07.

[51]  Miranda Abrashi.  The Fake Account for the Real Self , 2018 .

[52]  Ann Blandford,et al.  Signal Appropriation of Explicit HIV Status Disclosure Fields in Sex-Social Apps used by Gay and Bisexual Men , 2019, CHI.

[53]  K. Charmaz,et al.  Constructing Grounded Theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis Kathy Charmaz Constructing Grounded Theory: A practical guide through qualitative analysis Sage 224 £19.99 0761973532 0761973532 [Formula: see text]. , 2006, Nurse researcher.

[54]  Nancy A. Van House,et al.  Feminist HCI meets facebook: Performativity and social networking sites , 2011, Interacting with computers.

[55]  L. Suchman.  Agencies in Technology Design: Feminist Reconfigurations* , 2020, Machine Ethics and Robot Ethics.

[56]  Robert E. Kraut,et al.  Growing closer on facebook: changes in tie strength through social network site use , 2014, CHI.

[57]  A. Hochschild.  Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure , 1979, American Journal of Sociology.

[58]  Lucy Suchman,et al.  Human-Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions , 2006 .

[59]  Lois Ann Scheidt,et al.  It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens , 2015, New Media Soc..

[60]  R. Asen.  Seeking the “Counter” in Counterpublics , 2000 .

[61]  E. Goffman.  The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life , 1959 .

[62]  Alice E. Marwick.  'I’m a Lot More Interesting than a Friendster Profile': Identity Presentation, Authenticity and Power in Social Networking Services , 2005 .

[63]  Susan Bordo.  Unbearable Weight: Feminism, Western Culture, and the Body , 1993 .

[64]  A. Wechsler.  Twilight Zones The Hidden Life Of Cultural Images From Plato To Oj , 2016 .

[65]  Brooke Erin Duffy,et al.  “You never really know who’s looking”: Imagined surveillance across social media platforms , 2018, New Media Soc..