RESEARCH ARTICLE
Impression Management within Instagram Stories: A Phenomenological Study
Vidi Sukmayadi1, *, Azizul Halim Yahya2
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2019Volume: 12
First Page: 216
Last Page: 224
Publisher ID: TOPSYJ-12-216
DOI: 10.2174/1874350101912010216
Article History:
Received Date: 10/09/2019Revision Received Date: 27/11/2019
Acceptance Date: 11/12/2019
Electronic publication date: 31/12/2019
Collection year: 2019
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode. This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Objective:
This study is aimed at exploring the motivation and impression management strategies of “Instagram Stories” users.
Materials and Methods:
The authors interviewed 30 Instagram influencers in updating their contents on the Instagram Stories feature. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to capture the informants’ experience and consciousness in producing their online content as a part of their impression management.
Results:
The main findings of the study were as follows; First, Self-existence, viewers’ attractiveness, and innovativeness of the application have become the core motivation for the users in choosing the Instastory feature. Secondly, the impression management applied by the users as their front stage lies in the construction of their uploaded contents. Lastly, the users of Instagram Stories constructed their content in the form of thematic consistency, uniqueness, “captions” and information (image) editing.
Conclusion:
The present study indicated that the impression management pattern in using Instagram stories had become an integral part of the uploaded content to fulfil the users’ highest self-satisfaction and maximum impacts on the viewers as well as their virtual followers.