Abstract
The United Nations’ World Happiness Report has ranked Finland as the happiest country for three consecutive years. In this research, we employed thematic analysis to analyze Instagram posts (N = 650) tagged with the hashtag “#happy” produced by Finnish-speaking users (#onnellinen in Finnish) during 2018, the first year that Finland gained the title of happiest country.We found that the representations of happiness constructed on Instagram included seven shared and distinguishable themes: Social relationships, Physical appearance, Free Time, Nature, Success, Pets and Material Things. Drawing from the social representations theory approach, the results revealed a multi-layered structure of the representations of happiness organized around three dichotomies: social–individual, relaxing–pursuing and immaterial–material, which were anchored to ideas of “gratitude” (toward something or someone) and “pride” (toward the self). The dichotomy “self-oriented/other-oriented” was interpreted to constitute the themata (underlying structure) of the emerging social representation of happiness.The paper contributes to the research of everyday knowledge by demonstrating how understandings related to happiness are shaped on Instagram, as well as by proposing a possible strategy for exploring the construction of everyday understandings of different societal issues employing new communication technology platforms containing both visual and textual elements.
Highlights
We aim to explore how the visual and textual contents of Instagram posts combine in the construction of everyday understandings of happiness in digitally mediated communication
To answer the first research question What are the main contents on the Instagram posts marked with the hashtag “happy” in Finland?, the thematic analysis shows that the posts included seven distinguishable common themes, which we named according to the characteristics that best described the commonalities found in them: Social relationships, Physical appearance, Free Time, Nature, Success, Pets and Material Things
To answer the second research question How is happiness made tangible and how is it given meanings in these posts?, we describe the aforementioned themes of the Instagram posts by using the analytical concepts of social representations theory (SRT)
Summary
The purpose of hashtags in social media is to identify, classify and categorize messages in relation to a specific topic. They communicate contextual cues to give more depth to a caption or photo. #onnellisuus (happiness) occurred 26,673 times; #ilo (joy) 105,867 times; #iloinen (joyous) 28,023 times; and, #hyvinvointi (well-being) 87,065 times. This reflects the more common usage of the adjective “happy” in everyday spoken language compared to the noun, which, in Finnish language, presents more abstract connotations. Along with the photo the and hashtag “happy,” other hashtags used, as well the caption of the post, constituted part of the material on which we based our analysis
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