FINSTAS AND RINSTAS: PERFORMING IDENTITY

Abstract

Social media, and particularly Instagram use, is ubiquitous today with the development of technology. While digital geographies have focused on the growth of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and big data analyses, there has been little focus given to individual-scale digital geographies and exploration of how people use and think of social media platforms such as Instagram. Today, with an emerging phenomena of Instagram users separating their online identities into multiple accounts – Finstas and Rinstas – we must ask the following questions: why are Finstas being created, and how are they maintained? How do individuals perform their identities online, and how does the presence of others affect this performance? With the increasing ease of creating accounts and online spaces for self-performance of identity, an exploration of how people perceive and perform their identities online is thus warranted. By conceptualising online accounts as online ‘places’, this thesis makes sense of Instagram Finsta and Rinsta behaviour through the lens of tourism geography by using Goffman (1978)’s dramaturgy and the host-guest ‘mutual gaze’ (Maoz,2006) as conceptual tools that are applied to Instagram user behaviour. It reveals that Finstas and Rinstas are both ‘front-stages’ of identity performance, with Instagram users knowingly searching for a ‘performative’ authenticity in the performance of other users. It then asserts that this ‘performative’ authenticity is one that is constantly monitored and (re)defined by the host-guest ‘mutual gaze’, where different performances of identity and authenticity are staged depending on whether interactions occur on Finstas or Rinstas. This integration of digital and tourism geography thus elucidates that identity performance online is much more complex than originally perceived, and new attention should be given to the role of social media accounts as places where new forms of identity self-performance occur. Key Words: Instagram and Social Media, Identity Performance, Host-Guest Relations, Mutual Gaze, Online Spaces, Authenticity