Abstract
Since the 1990s, blogging platforms have emerged as influential arenas for personal expression, social interaction, customization, and exploratory engagement with digital media. These early online environments enabled users to construct autobiographical spaces through the curation of texts, images, titles, and affective exchanges, forming distinctive modes of self-representation. In the 21st century, image-driven platforms such as Instagram and TikTok have reconfigured these dynamics, centering the creation, circulation, and performative consumption of visual content. This research critically examines how contemporary “content creators” utilize such platforms to construct, manipulate, and disseminate visual narratives that constitute their social personae. Anchored in the theoretical framework of Visual Culture, the study interrogates the aesthetics, temporalities, and discursive strategies mobilized in the formation of digital identities. It considers platforms not merely as commercial infrastructures, but as complex socio-technical environments shaped by autobiographical labor and algorithmic mediation. Methodologically informed by Visual Anthropology and Discourse Analysis, the investigation explores how practices of memory, archiving, and montage are mobilized in the self-fashioning processes of users. Special attention is given to the visual artifact as a site of narrative construction and symbolic negotiation. As a conceptual contribution, the study proposes the notion of Life Expansion—a fictionalizing autobiographical practice through which users aestheticize fragments of everyday life into curated digital selves. In doing so, it aims to illuminate the entanglements between subjectivity, visuality, and platform logics in contemporary networked culture.
Presenters
Pablo VallejosStudent, PhD, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Digital Narratives, Social Media, Editing, Montage, Fiction, Autobiography
