The instapoetry genre and the collective intelligence

Abstract

In recent years, the diffusion of social networks has led to intense cultural and linguistic transformations in our globalized society. Through the technological advancement and the multiplicity of genres that emerge in the digital world, the creation and transformation of genres is due to the multimodal language tools offered in several virtual platforms, among which we highlight Instagram – online social network for sharing content. Within this popular tool, a growing movement of young poets has gained literary prominence. The short, shareable and varied-themed texts of the instapoets – Instagram authors – are a reflection of a new generation that has been dictating a new concept of publication and communication among the reading public. In view of this strong tendency, we observed the structure of instapoetry in the light of Systemic-Functional Linguistics, Generic Structure Potential and Grammar of Visual Design. In this paper we investigate the frameworks of instapoetry as a genre in cyberspace, with the purpose of understanding some systematizations thereof. The corpus of the work is composed of texts by some exponents of this literature in the international scene (e.g. Rupi Kaur, Nikita Gill, Atticus), which have been gaining popularity by the sensitivity to what some authors define as “collective intelligence” (COSTA, 2015). Our results indicate that, despite the great diversity, there are aspects of the compositional form, theme and style that configure this new tradition of the digital era as a genre. The results revealed the influence of the collective intelligence on instapoetry, as well as evidenced other characteristics of the genre.