Communication Case Study

Case Study Paper

How we represent ourselves online is not always consistent with our real life representation of ourselves. Communication technologies have increasingly made it possible for individuals and even companies to “advertise” the ideal version of them by choice selection of self-representation. Social media is a computer mediated communication and communication technology that is favorably used to achieve the goal of representing the “best” version of one self. Consistent with this course I will use course concepts to a real life example of computer mediated communication. The social media entity that attracted me in which I am going to specifically focus on is Instagram. Instagram is a computer mediated communication (CMC) website and application. By focusing on the literature that I have reviewed, I will be arguing that Instagram is a CMC where users utilize the art of selective self-representation.

Instagram allows users solely use pictures as the drive, platform, and focus of users and viewers. Users solely represent themselves with these photos with captions of their choice. These captions are also found in the user’s bio. The captions can vary from a quote to lyrics to a song that the user uses to describe the picture posted. The bio and the caption to the picture is where you witness Tong & Walther’s hyper personal perspective. Ellison stated that present cues are amplified when there is a reduction of cues used (p.425).

On Instagram users are able to filter their pictures to enhance photos to increase their likeability. Photo enhancer applications have been created specifically to cater to Instagram users. These filters alter and misrepresent the users’ actual appearance. Many users of Instagram have made comments and/or memes surrounding the topic of “fake pictures” or filtered pictures. In which filtered pictures are not popular to those users who want to know the user with the filtered picture on a higher level. Some people...