BEYOND THE HASHTAG: EXPLORING THE MULTIFACETED WORLD OF BOOKSTAGRAM

Abstract

In the ever-evolving world of digital technologies, bookstagram is taking over the literature landscape, with the phenomenon of digital book lovers sparking a variety of research. Thus, the online space created specifically for readers around the world starts from its emergence as a hashtag and is shaped by the evolution of social media applications and, by extension, consumer demands. In such manner, keywords and themes relevant to a better understanding of the Instagram trend are established in articles from online databases that this study aims to examine. In other words, the research investigates the nature of bookstagram present in the literature through a quantitative analysis of bookstagram articles from their first appearance to the present, starting with 90 and narrowing our study to 15. Thus, the VOSviewer software is chosen as a tool, which provides a bibliometric map of all implemented papers from the Web of Science database interpreting data about the aforementioned trend. Therefore, the aim of the paper is to better understand the #bookstagram phenomenon since its first appearances in the literature, laying the foundations of relevant concepts and ideas to characterize it. So, bookstagram is relatively new in the Internet ecosystem, but it is strengthening every day the interest of digital users to discuss and learn about books, regardless of the social media platform used. There is also a growing interest in the impact the trend is having on modern literary culture. Moreover, the research will be an important pawn in the growing value of information encompassing the modern phenomenon of reading lovers on the social media platform Instagram.