Instagram: The search for happiness from the self-promotion of the image

Abstract

From a feminist and sociological approach to socioeconomic structures and emotions, as well as to new technologies, this work investigates the images published in Instagram as a strategy to capture the gaze, which can be capitalized on by followers and likes in young people between 20 and 35 years old. This qualitative research, carried out during the years 2019/2020 based on observations and semi-structured online and offline interviews, contributes to technological, cultural and affective reflections on the shaping of the gaze as a regulation mechanism in social networks. It reflects on the way in which what has been published responds to hegemonic aesthetics of beauty, class, consumption, and capacity, in a neoliberal context where individualism and liberal politicization of bodies prevails, as well as the uncertainty of the flexibility and lability of social rights that encourage self-demanding and individual responsibility for the trajectories that are built.