Language, images, and Paris Orly airport on Instagram: multilingual approaches to identity and self-representation on social media

Abstract

ABSTRACTGiven the emergence of a specific trope in social network services, whereby individuals upload an image that includes a passport and/or a boarding pass to index their status as a traveller, this article explores multilingual and multimodal creativity in the construction of identity by a body of individuals who pass through Paris’ Orly airport. In particular, collecting data from the mobile photo-sharing platform Instagram permits the analysis of the authorial control exerted by the Original Poster (OP) over their discursive practices from two distinct perspectives. One line of enquiry is the examination of preferred readings of the images by the OP, which is either affirmed or contested by the poster’s friends, followers, and others, with the view to assessing trends in language practices amongst users. A second vector is the (re)creative approach, where the OP often uses expensive branded goods in the image in a ludic way to convey a sense of their identity. To this end, we discuss how individuals draw on visual resources to hand to present themselves to others. Based on a corpus of images uploaded and geotagged at Orly airport, we explore here the approaches to self-representation on social media in order to typologize the resources – including languages – that twenty-first-century French nationals draw upon to create their individual but simultaneously collective identity.