#Happy: Constructing and Sharing Everyday Understandings of Happiness on Instagram
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#Happy: Constructing and Sharing Everyday Understandings of Happiness on Instagram Jennifer De Paola1 · Eemeli J. Hakoköngäs2 · Jari J. Hakanen1,3 Received: 7 May 2020 / Revised: 11 September 2020 / Accepted: 1 October 2020 © The Author(s) 2020
Abstract The United Nations’ World Happiness Report has ranked Finland as the happiest country for three consecutive years. In this research, we employed thematic analysis to analyze Instagram posts (N = 650) tagged with the hashtag “#happy” produced by Finnish-speaking users (#onnellinen in Finnish) during 2018, the first year that Finland gained the title of happiest country. We found that the representations of happiness constructed on Instagram included seven shared and distinguishable themes: Social relationships, Physical appearance, Free Time, Nature, Success, Pets and Material Things. Drawing from the social representations theory approach, the results revealed a multi-layered structure of the representations of happiness organized around three dichotomies: social–individual, relaxing–pursuing and immaterial– material, which were anchored to ideas of “gratitude” (toward something or someone) and “pride” (toward the self). The dichotomy “self-oriented/other-oriented” was interpreted to constitute the themata (underlying structure) of the emerging social representation of happiness. The paper contributes to the research of everyday knowledge by demonstrating how understandings related to happiness are shaped on Instagram, as well as by proposing a possible strategy for exploring the construction of everyday understandings of different societal issues employing new communication technology platforms containing both visual and textual elements. Keywords Instagram · Social media · Happiness · Everyday understandings · Social representations · Culture and technology
* Jennifer De Paola [email protected] 1
Faculty of Social Sciences, Social Psychology, University of Helsinki, P.O.Box 54, University of Helsinki 00014, Finland
2
Department of Social Sciences, Social Psychology, University of Eastern Finland, Kuopio, Finland
3
The Finnish Institute of Occupational Health, Helsinki, Finland
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Introduction “Say cheese!” It is an instruction that countless photographers have given for so long that most people understand the prompt as an alert, seconds before a picture is taken, to smile for the camera. In the era of the Internet and social media, capturing and sharing life’s happy moments seem to have become more popular than ever. At the moment of writing, more than 566 million photos marked with the hashtag “happy” have been posted to the photo-sharing social networking service Instagram by English-speaking users alone. By using popular hashtags such as #happy, individual Instagram users participate in the wider social process of constructing, shaping and circulating everyday understandings of happiness. Happiness is a complex concept defined and employed in the scientific literature in various ways that overlap with o
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