Digital identity performance through emoji on the social media platform Instagram

Abstract

IntroductionEmoji are omnipresent features of digital discourses and have become almost inherent features of online interactions. Given the large and ever-increasing variety of emoji, it is not farfetched to assume that users will have preferences for particular emoji or emoji combinations, and that their preferences are indexically related to their identities, for example in terms of skin-tone and/or gender. With a case study, the present paper aims to address a particular gap in the extant literature, namely the role of emoji in the presentation of different identities of one individual, namely a US American female in her early 20s.MethodsThe data for this study was drawn from Instagram and comprises a total of 625 posts made by one user to three of her own accounts with the platform. Each account represents a different aspect of her identity, and the analysis demonstrates that while the use of some emoji remains stable across all of her accounts, other emoji are very account-specific in that they are employed to highlight one particular aspect of her identity.ResultsThe results thus indicate the different values that emoji might have in the contexts of authorship analyses. Additional studies are required to investigate this phenomenon further.