The Instagrammable outdoors – Investigating the sharing of nature experiences through visual social media

1. Despite the growing popularity of Instagram as a medium to portray nature and the outdoors, there remains limited research available exploring its influence on people's experiences in nature. We investigate Instagram as a three-way negotiation between users, the platform's affordances and social norms associated with both Instagram use and outdoor experiences. 2. Moving beyond polarized, conceptual debates situating social media affordances within dystopias and eutopias, we provide empirical insight from the lived experiences of everyday Instagram users reflecting upon their mediated outdoor activities. 3. We found that participants shared special moments, beautiful landscapes and happy memories while they struggled with notions of authenticity associated with these experiences. They perceived certain scenes as more ‘Instagrammable’ than others


| INTRODUC TI ON
Everyday life has become intertwined with mobile media technology (Castells, 2010).Smartphones and social media have created the opportunity to record and share many of our pursuits.Outdoor leisure is no exception as people plan, track, capture and share their activities in the outdoors via apps and social media (Carter et al., 2018;Shultis, 2012).However, the outdoors is also often seen as one of the few spaces where we can disconnect from the busyness of life and the technologies that come with it (Brown, 2015;Edensor, 2000;Michael, 2009).This has led to discussions in the media, in academia and in user communities on the influence of new technologies on our outdoor experiences (Arts et al., 2015;Shultis, 2012), with research into the lived experiences of users pointing to a complex interlacing of mobile media technologies and outdoor activities (Arts et al., 2021;Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020;Gray et al., 2018;Shultis, 2015).
Media, and especially visual media, have for long time played a role in the social construction of outdoor experiences (Urry & Larsen, 2011), with landscape painting and nature photography influencing how we construct the outdoor landscape.In Western cultures, (natural) landscapes developed from mere background to a central theme in paintings from the 14th century onwards (Lemaire, 2007).An important influence on our present-day landscape imagery is the 19th century landscape artists who often portrayed landscapes as a rural idyll or the sublime, placing 'man' as a lone observer watching over the landscape (Smith, 2019).In the 20th century, both photography and leisure travel became more commonplace (Urry & Larsen, 2011) and visual representation became an increasingly important experiential realm, with media technology offering a way to capture the experience.Visual media have helped shape ideas on conservation and wildness, yet at the same time present themselves as allowing an unedited, direct view of nature (Adams, 2019;Bousé, 2000;Büscher, 2016).Adams (2005) suggests that most of our contact with nature is mediated, carrying ideologies on what nature is or should be.And while applications of technologies in the forms of games, text messaging or even GPS may be eyed with suspicion in outdoor leisure, photography has established itself as a culturally acceptable way of using technology in the outdoors (Bolliger et al., 2020).
Smartphones have widened the opportunities for photo taking and sharing, enabled by social network platforms, particularly Instagram which is focused on sharing pictures and videos.Poulsen (2018) points out that Instagram has made tools, knowledge and skills that were previously linked to professional photographers available to a wider public.This has influenced the visualization of the everyday, where images of leisure activities and personal experiences have become aestheticized through professional editing tools (Ibrahim, 2015).The popularity of visual social media platforms-evidenced by Instagram's one billion plus users active at least once a month, and its 500 million daily users (Dean, 2021;Instagram, 2020)-illustrates the importance of visual representation as images become 'an integral part of our identity construction, communication and sustenance of relationships today' (Ibrahim, 2015, p. 43).A key difference between current social media platforms and previous mass media images of the outdoors is that social media offer the opportunity for everyone to construct and tell their own outdoor story, increasing possibilities for diverse representations (Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020;Gray et al., 2018).However, by the same token, social media can also reproduce pre-existing media images and representations of the outdoors (Büscher, 2013;Smith, 2019), reinforcing stereotypes and reducing and constraining diversity.
Taking the increased opportunities to communicate to a large audience as well as the influence of visual media on the social construction of the outdoors into account, we contend that visual media platforms such as Instagram will strongly impact on how we interact with the outdoors.However, research into these interactions is still developing and has mainly focused on popular accounts and hashtags (e.g.Gray et al., 2018;Smith, 2019), while the lived experience of the everyday user posting about their outdoor activities on Instagram has remained underexplored.Yet, with more than 500 million people using Instagram daily to communicate about their lives, it is within these interactions between everyday user and platform that we can find a greater understanding in both how the outdoors is experienced and how social media may influence this.In this study, we therefore investigate the interactions between Instagram users and the platform's features and how these interactions influence the users' own outdoor experiences.

| Instagram-user interactions
Mobile media technologies blur the lines between virtual and physical spaces with which we interact (de Souza e Silva & Sutko, 2011) and create an augmented space where interactions online can influence actions offline and vice versa (Stinson, 2017).To understand how these spaces interlace, we take the concept of sociomateriality as our starting point.This concept, developed by Orlikowski and Scott (2008), is used both in organizational studies and information systems literature, to draw attention to the dynamic relationship between humans and technology and views both technology and user as active participants, mutually shaping each other and together driving action and experiences (Cecez-Kecmanovic et al., 2014;Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013).
To study sociomaterial entanglements, we have to take into account the technology, the user and the situated context in which those two come together (Bloomfield et al., 2010;Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013).Untangling the mutual shaping character of social media and its users requires an understanding of the actions a platform enables and constrains, how users creatively make use of these and what social obligations and assumptions play a part.

| Instagram's affordances
Based on Latour's idea that technologies carry 'scripts' (Latour, 1992), Verbeek (2005, p. 171) describes how technologies as artefacts 'invite particular actions while discouraging others or even rendering them impossible'.By design, technologies are 'inscripted' with particular purposes or affordances.This means that they interact with the user to enable particular actions while constraining others.Boyd (2011, p. 45) argues that social network technologies (including social media platforms) 'introduce new affordances for amplifying, recording and spreading information and social acts '. Treem and Leonardi (2012) emphasize that offering visibility is key to social media, making our communications, connections, knowledge, behaviour and preferences accessible online.Boyd (2011) unpacks this visibility further by identifying four affordances that play a role: persistence (of online expressions, all our utterances becoming archived); replicability (of content, which can be copied, edited and (re)shared); scalability (potential of widespread visibility of content); and searchability (content can be accessed through search).These affordances can be studied by looking at concrete features and their interaction with user practices, but they also reveal insights into social dynamics and power structures on a more abstract level (Bucher & Helmond, 2018).Considering Instagram's features, Smith (2019) points out that the 'like' button affords users' reactions to posts, which 'fosters a dense web of connectivity' that in turn can create a sense of shared experience, as a user can see what their friends have liked.Moreover, these 'likes' also serve as a proxy for which posts are successful on Instagram.Helped by the scalability of the platform, certain posts will reach many users and may therefore influence how phenomena are being represented (Smith, 2019).Such affordances can be intentionally shaped by a platform's producers.Social media companies build on a rationality of commercialization (Büscher, 2016;Zuboff, 2019).Both social media companies and users with a large following (so-called influencers) are able to generate income from the widespread use of social media platforms through the commodification of their experience and the objects they refer to.This might incentivize users to share content they know will be successful in order to generate 'likes' (Smith, 2019).The scripts of social media platforms thus influence and alter information sharing processes and content, and thereby social representations, relationships as well as power structures and participation (Treem & Leonardi, 2012).While this might open opportunities for self-presentation, advocacy and increased social connections (Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020;Gray et al., 2018;Murthy, 2012), it also means that certain voices can become disproportionately strong, and that the authenticity of stories can become disputed (boyd, 2011;Haider, 2016;Smith, 2019).What is afforded and how affordances are realized is a dynamic process, arising from user's interactions with the technology in their specific context, which determines how social media features are used in practice (Rietveld & Kiverstein, 2014).

| Users' motivations and self-presentation
Humans are creative in their use of technologies, making the interaction between technology and user context specific, temporary and fragile (Bloomfield et al., 2010).How social media are integrated into someone's life depends, for example, on their motivations to use a platform.Various motivations have been attributed to Instagram use, including self-promotion, surveillance, documentation of life events, passing the time, entertainment and social interaction (Alhabash & Ma, 2017;Sheldon & Bryant, 2016).Users with different motivations will make use of affordances such as visibility, replicability and searchability in diverse ways.Studies on user interactions with social media platforms often build upon Goffman's (1959) idea of self-presentation, understanding the motivation to become involved in a platform as a desire to express one's identity (Aguirre & Davies, 2015;Gray et al., 2018;Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015).Social media create a co-presence of user and audience, which leads people to want to 'project a self' of who the user is as a person (Aguirre & Davies, 2015).Goffman's theory makes a distinction between a frontstage, where people manage a public performance, and a backstage, which involves more private interactions and is less orchestrated.The accessibility of the platform, which can be used at any time and any place, offers opportunities to not only present a frontstage image, but also to show the backstage of one's life.Yet, as the platform also affords persistence and scalability, rendering posts potentially accessible to everyone, forever, these presentations will most likely still be a curated view of the backstage (Murthy, 2012).This makes creating a post a cognitive process, influenced by collective ideas and social norms on both outdoor activities and social media, in which users actively negotiate their own goals, motivations and their beliefs on what the audience expects (Gray et al., 2018).

| Social norms and performativity
Not only the individual user, but also social groups and society more generally carry assumptions and norms related to the use of media technology, which influence the relationships between user and social media platform (Jarzabkowski & Pinch, 2013).While social media can be a stage for conscious self-presentation, there is also a level of performativity involved, where learned patterns and social norms influence usage (Lo & McKercher, 2015;Schwartz & Halegoua, 2015;Van House, 2011).Users' ideas on how to use a platform are shaped by norms about appropriate social media use and appropriate ways to explore the outdoors.Instagram's photo editing tools, for example, allow users to enhance their pictures but also raise questions about the (in)authenticity of representations and experiences (Germann Molz, 2012;Leppänen et al., 2015).Moreover, gender norms can play a role.Gray et al. (2018), for example, showed that in portraying their outdoor activities, many women tend to follow traditional (western) standards of beauty, posting 'manicured' pictures of themselves seemingly unaffected by their outdoor pursuit.The authors point out that this 'aestheticization' is something that the platform seems to promote.Yet, at the same time, it also offers a space where female outdoor enthusiasts can express their identity, thus giving a good example of how technology, user and social practices all interact to create the entanglement that construct social media.

| Interactions between online and offline experiences
The actual outdoor experience also influences how social media platforms are used.However, more importantly, the use of Instagram might reflexively influence what is experienced in the outdoors.
Images can evoke strong reactions, intimacy and memories (Abbott et al., 2013;Pittman & Reich, 2016;Van Dijck, 2008); yet, they are also constructed by a long history of art and photography, shaping current motifs, styles and content (Smith, 2019).The representations of activities or landscapes are not a simple reflection of reality, but carry 'mentalities, ideologies and identities' (Alù & Hill, 2018, p. 1).Urry and Larsen (2011) capture this in the concept of the tourist gaze, describing the way people look at the environment as a learned skill that 'orders, shapes and classifies, rather than reflects, the world' (Larsen, 2006, p. 245).Taking and sharing pictures of the outdoors mediates the way we see and experience a landscape, as the landscape is given meaning through the representations that have been previously constructed by visual media (Despard, 2015).Raad's (2020) study on Americans' views of the mountains showed, for example, that people visit the mountains with an a priori sense of what they will see and experience, coloured by both their own memory and the representation of the landscape in visual culture.
Photographs taken during leisure activities are therefore not necessarily a reflection of a world existing independently of the human gaze, as people seek out and photograph what they have already seen in other visual media.This pre-existing frame creates obligations to see and capture particular scenes or 'Kodak moments' (Urry & Larsen, 2011), or as Raad (2020) describes it: 'Media and images therefore affect the experience of a place both before and after it is visited.Viewing an image of a place before going there governs how someone sees the landscape.Upon returning home, visual reminders of the trip such as photographs influence how the place is remembered' (Raad, 2020, p. 2-3).
While previously most of the images that influenced people were those publicized in magazines or outdoor guidebooks, social media have opened up the representation of the outdoors to everyone by merging 'technologies of visualization' with 'technologies of communication' (Germann Molz, 2012).Van Dijck (2008) registers a shift from using photography to document memories to using it as a way to get in touch, a tool for creating connections.
As described above, this (everyday) communication involves selfpresentation in a social context.For example, Instagram outdoor pictures often depict a similar motif, that of the 'promontory witness', where one or two individuals are gazing outwards, often from an elevated point, at an awe-inducing landscape (Smith, 2019).As popular images on Instagram are promoted (by Instagram's algorithm) to be shown more frequently, this motif is able to repeat itself as Instagram users start copying the style of the most successful photographs.This might lead to outdoor experiences being communicated in a homogenizing way, creating hegemonic stories (Smith, 2019).Yet, with a user-technology entanglement that is situated and relational, it also means that users play an active role in building Instagram's content and can use the platform to imagine places, as well as themselves 'anew' (Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020).
Technology, users, their social context and the outdoors all interact with each other to create the content and meaning of visual social media.The resulting effects are often painted in a negative light, with news articles discussing the overcrowding of places and unpreparedness in the outdoors as a result of Instagram, or the superficial experiences of 'Instagram travellers' (e.g. Cosslett, 2018;Pidd, 2020;Williams, 2019).In academic debate, mobile media technology evokes strong negative as well as positive reactions, theorizing technology use as either something curtailing authentic (outdoor) experiences, or affording the exploration of (outdoor) identities without boundaries (Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020;Shultis, 2012).Yet, empirically, we know very little about how Instagram mediates users' experiences and vice versa.
In our analysis, we unpack such sociomaterial entanglements, and look at how both criticisms and celebrations of Instagram are reflected in the actual experiences of users.We thus move beyond conceptual considerations towards an understanding of users' lived experiences.

| ME THODS
Our qualitative study explored technology use by outdoor recreationists in Scotland.We collected data in three stages, each involving different individuals (Table 1).Most participants mentioned multiple motivations, which were incorporated into a range of strategies of Instagram use.Some participants made their account public, while others chose to have it private.For those latter participants, their goal was to share with friends and family, and they did not see the point in sharing their personal stories with others.Some had started with public accounts but switched to private accounts along the way.This suggests that for some of our participants Instagram was not just about generating likes or reaching a lot of people.While the platform afforded visibility, searchability and scalability that allowed content of one's day-to-day life to be visible to the entire world, users

With limited data available
iteratively considered what Instagram had to offer, their own goals, motivations and the audiences they wanted to reach.
These considerations were clearly shown in our participants' use of hashtags.Hashtags can be used to link posts to a specific topic, event, place or theme.Other users can search for a specific hashtag, which will then show all connected (public) posts.These hashtags allowed our participants to follow topics that they were interested in but could, for example, also be used to find new outdoor places to go to.Some of our participants used hashtags to promote certain places or activities: I think, looking at my hashtags I am often promoting Scotland somehow.I'd be like "look at this amazing country, look at this beautiful place we live in, get out and explore it, and enjoy it".(…) I guess sometimes it would be nice to think that people that would be googling like the North-West for example, might come across some of the photos and be like, "oh yeah that is a great spot to go.We should go".One participant mentioned using hashtags purposefully for specific posts, for example, to promote her work, while she did not tag more private posts.While hashtags were often used deliberately, for example to promote a place, business, activity or organization, participants also felt unsure how hashtags really worked, and why some seemed to generate much more exposure than others.
Hashtags is something that I actually have become All these different strategies for handling public distribution showed that users did not simply look for maximum exposure or high numbers of likes, but considered different goals, motivations and the features that Instagram offered, to find practices that suited them.

| Norms and assumptions: Managing Instagram's aestheticization
Managing This eventually meant that participants would mainly upload images of more extraordinary activities and less so of more generic or everyday activities.Some participants were aware of this and admitted that they knew the memories they were 'storing' were only of notable events, not necessarily representing their everyday life or whole identity.This meant, for example, that some did not like to edit their pictures, as they wanted the picture to reflect reality.Editing was explained as a way to better represent the experience, but not alter too much of the content.
I noticed that usually the goal with Scotland, unless it is a really good bright day, is to make it look slightly less grey.(…)I do think Scottish landscapes, while they are stunning, there is usually a bit more work done to the photos to make them look like that… (…) Sometimes you can make it look not real, and I don't like that.The more you edit, the more unrealistic it can look.And I think it a stylistic thing, some people like the highly edited photos and the highly, highly filtered and it can look a bit like, other-worldly.Whereas I like there to be, like that realism in it.And it is just about enhancing as opposed to changing.(Sienna) Instagram makes the editing of pictures relatively easy, with preset filters to choose from or the option to adjust brightness, saturation and other features with a simple slider.This was also noted by our participants, as some pointed out that Instagram filters allowed people to create their own Instagram style.Participants knew accounts that posted all their pictures with the same filter or colour scheme, although none of our participants would apply this to their own account.They also noted that many Instagram accounts they followed used compositions and themes similar to each other, where outdoor imagery often included a spectacular landscape, people engaged in outdoor sports or images of iconic wildlife.So, while all participants agreed that Instagram was a medium to share beautiful, inspiring images that were memorable for them, they also knew it was a very selective 'photobook' that they created.

| Shaping the outdoor experience
Photography had been integrated in all our participants' outdoor practices, but there were differences in how much the sharing of participants were aware of this influence, like Connor, they admitted they still would on occasion take the picture anyway.This repeating of the same motif was also demonstrated in the composition of the pictures, where certain frames of the landscape were recognized as 'Instagrammable' (Figure 3).

| D ISCUSS I ON
The Instagram posts in our analysis had undergone complex negotiation processes that involved the platform's functionalities as well as the user's identity, norms and personal preferences.The posts were used by our participants to achieve many different things: to assert their identity, to record memories, to educate or inspire, perhaps even to impress others.These motivations resemble those found in previous studies (Alhabash & Ma, 2017;Sheldon & Bryant, 2016).
Some of these motivations were very clear to our participants, while others were more implicit in their description of their interactions entanglements.The ubiquitous presence of social media on participants' smartphones resulted in tensions between the use of Instagram and the outdoor experience they envisioned, as some felt that engagement with social media could become too important in their outdoor activity, which also raised questions about the authenticity of their experiences.Leppänen et al., 2015).Our participants aspired to a certain kind of outdoor experience, one where they felt connected to a place and enjoyed the moment.It is this understanding of an outdoor experience that now needs to be reshaped in a world where social media are omnipresent.Germann Molz (2012) shows in her analysis that mobile media technologies are connected to three common anxieties people have about 'losing' an authentic life: (a) the threat of misrepresenting reality; (b) the threat of disconnection; and (c) the threat of corporate commodification.In our data, we found ideas of misrepresentation expressed in the remarks on the use of filters and photo editing.Although there was no clear rejection of photo editing per se-some participants mentioned how it could help to make a picture reflect the moment even better-there was an emphasis on the need to ensure a level of 'realness' of the picture.This reflects Germann Molz, (2012) conclusion that people like their post to represent or evoke the feeling of the experience itself, which mightcounter-intuitively-be facilitated by enhancing or editing aspects of the picture.

| Authenticity of experiences
Perceived authenticity of outdoor experience is evaluated through the social norms established for both outdoor practices and technology use (Leppänen et al., 2015).The outdoors has been constructed, for example in romantic tropes particularly in relation to recreation, as a place to get away from the 'hustle and bustle' of daily life, to seek challenges or to (re)connect to nature (Edensor, 2000;Kay & Moxham, 1996).Mobile media technologies, keeping people connected to precisely the 'hustle and bustle' they want to get a break from, can therefore feel out of place in the outdoors, invading on time and attention that 'ought' to be directed towards the outdoor activity and enjoyment of the moment (Brown, 2015;Shultis, 2012).However, mobile media technologies also offer opportunities to strengthen people's feeling of being connected.They allow people to share their experience with others, opening up places to include new narratives and diverse voices.That social media can be technologies of both 'connection and disconnection' (Germann Molz, 2012, p. 125 emphasis in original) was a thought that was also expressed by our participants, who used Instagram to connect to their family but also feared a disconnection from the outdoors.
When it comes to the threat of corporate commodification, social media are undeniably linked to commercialization processes (Büscher, 2016).The rationale of social media platforms is to keep people scrolling as long as possible, with algorithms choosing those posts that perform best (Tribe & Mkono, 2017).This can threaten the ideas of authenticity as people might start constructing posts that they know will perform well, and construct-or simulate-their experience accordingly (Germann Molz, 2012).However, for our participants this seemed to be less of an issue, perhaps because many of them had decided to make their profile private, and therefore did not seek public, or even commercial, success themselves.Nevertheless, as we will see, a commodification rationale embedded in the technology might have influenced our participants in more subtle ways.

| Aestheticization and homogeneity of stories
The interactions between platform features, users and social context also shaped the ways in which the outdoors was portrayed.
There seemed to be a general level of agreement on the kind of pic-  Molz, 2012;Ibrahim, 2015), social media platforms are also scripted within a neoliberal rationale (Büscher, 2016;Zuboff, 2019).Previous research on Instagram posts and the way users create them showed a tendency to produce standardized posts, where users conform to perceived norms and structure of social media (Conti & Heldt Cassel, 2020).While Instagram, on the one hand, allows people to adopt a personal style by offering a large variety of filters and editing options, the visibility of other people's posts leads to people copying each other's style, creating 'consistent aesthetics' following standards set by mass media (Smith, 2019, p. 9, see also Gray et al., 2018).At the same time, most of our participants did not see personal branding as their prime motivator; they posted for friends and family, not in order to become influential.Although Photo elicitation interviews (Sienna) Yet, other participants actively avoided adding hashtags as reaching a large audience was not why they used Instagram, or as Kirsten described it: 'I didn't want to feel like Instagram was something I was doing for other people, I wanted to feel like it was something that I was still doing for myself and primarily to show to my friends and family what I have been doing'.Moreover, the promotion of places was concerning to some, who expressed anxiety about jeopardizing the remoteness and solitude of special locations by creating Instagram notoriety.
better at, but I still don't fully understand them (…) I find that my pictures in general get fifty to sixty likes (…) But there has been a couple of posts that just have gone crazy (…)[one]  was on the ferry to Orkney, the sky was really stormy but there is a rainbow and you can see all the fulmars and stuff.And it got loads of likes, and I was like, right okay, I wonder what it is that I hashtagged that's got more people to look at it.(Iris) photobook, storing personal memories meaningful to the participants.

I
wonder if I judge it correctly, because I think sometimes I feel like I am very outdoorsy or people think I always am outside, because maybe I post it (…) [I wonder] what do the other people get from me, based on my profile, and what do they not see.(Ella) Participants reflected throughout the interviews on the ubiquity of these spectacular images, and some tried to tell some alternative stories with their picture.Kristen, for example, posted two pictures of a climb she had done, one portraying her climbing partner 'in action' and one of the ledge she was standing on.Talking about why she included this second picture (Figure 1) she mentioned: Well, part of me wondered if you would be able to see the little seal that I'd befriended and I thought it would be nice if we get the seal in there, and the other part is that, I always feel like people on Instagram want to capture just the most beautiful part of the moment, but actually realistically, we were climbing on bird poo covered ledges, which is like a little bit grim and not everyone's cup of tea.So, I just kind of wanted a little bit of an antidote to the "look at this amazing climbing", but also "look I am here standing on a poo covered ledge with the numb toes, I can barely feel my fingers… so cold".So, I wanted to provide a balanced view of the situation I guess.(Kristen) F I G U R E 1 Kristen's picture, along with the caption 'A February adventure across red wall ft.poo covered ledges and numb toes.I even made friends with a seal ' [Colour can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]While Kirsten emphasized her intent to show the unglamorous sides of climbing, the imagery as well as the caption still conveyed the spectacular nature of the climb.Participants also reflected on the tendency of Instagram to only show the spectacular by stressing the need to allow for an element of 'realness' in their posts.There was a need to make sure that what was shown in a post accurately represented what was experienced.
these images was part of their activities while being outdoors.A couple of our participants stated that Instagram was an important reason to record their activity, or to go somewhere, integrating sharing through social media into their activities.Quite often I take the pictures with Instagram in mind.So, I'll try and sort of think, you know if I am out or I wanna get some nice pictures, I wanna put these up on Instagram, so I don't find that I am taking loads and loads of photos (…) if it is just like a scenic shot, I'll take one and that will be the one that I will put up on Instagram, maybe with like a little bit of a filter, but usually not much.(Anne) These participants actively used Instagram to communicate about themselves, nature and their hybrid identities.The other participants all mentioned that they would go somewhere to do their outdoor activity, or for the experience itself, and Instagram was more of an afterthought, undertaken when back home, scrolling through the pictures and finding one that might be nice to post.Nevertheless, when scrolling through their Instagram posts and talking about particular images, it became clear that Instagram often already 'sneaked in' during their outdoor experience (Figure 2).I sometimes try and refuse to stop [in Applecross] for a photo.[Girlfriend] likes to stop there for a photo and I'll be like 'nooo, everyone is taking that photo, let's go somewhere else' (…) I mean, I am very much… what is the word…hypocrite.So, it's like 'noo don't take a photo' but then I have taken photos of it myself.(Connor) These practices were influenced by previous images of the same place or same activity shared in both mass and social media.Even if F I G U R E 2 Connor's girlfriend's picture, showing houses in Applecross, popular on Instagram [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com]ARTS eT Al.
photographing the moment to share and store it onInstagram.And with Instagram.Choosing whom to follow, as well as what to post, was part of establishing and performing their identity.Participants did not explicitly speak about this performative element themselves, but implicitly expressed the idea in their choices to promote diversity, their use/non-use of hashtags and their decisions around the kind of activities to portray.For example, some participants felt that a good outdoor citizen would not draw too much attention to places they visited, to prevent overcrowding.This shows how the platform's affordances, users' motivations and preferences, practice-related norms and shared beliefs on what Instagram should or should not be all interacted and highlights the complexity of such sociomaterial F I G U R E 3 Jack's picture, he chose this composition of heather in the foreground and mountain in the background after he had seen it in other pictures on Instagram [Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] tures that were 'Instagram-worthy': a good quality picture of a beautiful landscape or special moment.Social norms and assumptions of what Instagram was for, together with the influence of Instagram's algorithm to highlight particular outdoor representations, resulted in a common understanding of what an Instagrammable composition was.While the internet can afford new communities to be built and diverse stories to be posted, from the spectacular to the mundane (Germann