A critical approach to social media texts: A study of influencers’ texts on Instagram and adolescents’ challenges when encountering them

Abstract

This article presents a study with the research questions: How do social media influencers use linguistic and visual resources in texts on Instagram? and What challenges arise when adolescents engage with these texts? The background for the study is the Norwegian curriculum’s description of critical literacy as one of the core elements for the subject Norwegian as L1. The description emphasizes students’ ability to reflect on the reliability of texts and their power of influence. Social media is one type of arena where adolescents are greatly exposed to advertising, including influencer advertising. The first research question is answered through a multimodal critical discourse analysis of three advertising texts from Norwegian influencers on Instagram. The second question is answered by analyzing the questionnaire responses from 49 adolescents, aged 14 and 15, who were asked to evaluate the texts. A main finding of this study is that the influencer texts use a hybrid discourse which is both commercial and personal. The questionnaire results show that this hybrid makes it difficult for the adolescents to understand the intentions of the texts and whose interests they serve. The study indicates that the hybrid discourse has become normalized to the extent that it is perceived as natural and unproblematic. Previous studies have shown that it can be challenging for adolescents to critically evaluate digital texts and commercial texts. This study shows that new challenges arise with the development of new ways of marketing in digital media, and also the importance of critically approaching texts that are associated with leisure activities when working with critical literacy in the L1 subject.