Abstract
Instagram, much like Twitter, is a vital site of social movement documentation and activist possibility. This image-sharing social media platform functions as a digital neighborhood populated with digital “citizens” who utilize its many avenues of photo presentation for a variety of purposes: selfies and feminist-self love, memes, marketing, and the sharing and preservation of one’s travels, one’s food, one’s life. But like physical streets, the digital “streets” of Instagram are also occasionally filled with protest. Protesters use Instagram to geotag photos of protest with the real world address where the protest occurred, thus indexing protest images alongside more mundane photos that are geotagged with the same location. Geotag archives for popular protest sites such as the Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters in downtown Los Angeles simultaneously visualize daily activities, weapons and police officers, and protest (protest against the police, state-violence, and racism, but also rallies in support of the police, the state, and the current presidential administration). This essay explores how Instagram geotags allow us to construct a “digitally networked public sphere” and how we might use those geotag archives as extensions of our physical presence when protesting police violence.
Highlights
In early 2017, the year that saw the largest single-day demonstration in U.S history (Friedersdorf ) with the Women’s March on Washington, Vanity Fair published an article with the headline, “For Protesters, Doing It for the ’Gram Isn’t a Bad Thing” (Weaver)
Just as real world locations have been swarmed by hundreds, sometimes thousands of bodies during protests, so too has Instagram been inundated with images of these protest swarms
In addition photos appearing in Instagram user timelines, the geotag archives associated with popular protest locations are filling up with images of protest as well.[2]
Summary
Much like Twitter, is a vital site of social movement documentation and activist possibility. In their article on Twitter hashtag ethnography after the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, scholars Yarimar Bonilla and Jonathan Rosa consider hashtags as possible field sites, and distinguish between #Ferguson and the real world location of the town of Ferguson, Missouri They explore the disparate tweets indexed together by their use of the Ferguson hashtag and recognize the https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-pearl/. In order to most effectively highlight the functions of protest imagery in these archives, I will use the example of a 2017 protest that occurred at the real world LAPD HQ and that continues to survive in the digital construction of that space via its Instagram geotag archive. They enlarge a reality that is felt to be shrunk, hollowed out, perishable, remote’ (127) These protest images resist the authority of laws and regulations that keep IRL bodies from permanently occupying police headquarters by allowing the digital construction of that https://adanewmedia.org/2018/11/issue14-pearl/. Even when our bodies can no longer fill the space in front of the police headquarters, our digital selves can hold the floor until we are ready to refuel and return
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