Instagram Stories and the Commodification of Everyday Life
Summary
This thesis sets out to explore the commodification of everyday life that is occurring through Instagram’s Story feature. The Story feature’s main characteristic is that posts will be deleted after the 24 hour time limit is reached. Users are drawn to post their everyday lives onto these Stories because of the fleeting nature and decreased pressure that comes along with it. The commodification of everyday life was researched by using the walkthrough method that was developed by Light et al. and adding an autoethnographic element to the walkthrough portion to understand the experience of posting Stories. Combining the insights gained through the method with concepts of the everyday by Heidegger and De Certeau and the view of commodification on platforms by Van Dijck I argue that users commodify their everyday life. Instagram markets Stories to users as a way to share their everyday lives so that they can increase engagement of their user base. This high level of engagement can be advertised to potential advertisers. Advertisers are interested in high engagement as this can result in higher conversion rates. The Stories result in higher engagement within the app and Instagram can trade this engagement for revenue. By capturing their everyday lives through the Story feature users are able to gain likes and followers from these Stories. Their everyday life gets traded for things that carry value, likes and followers. As a result both Instagram and the users are commodifying everyday life through the Story feature in order to generate value.