The Image of the City on Social Media: Case of İzmir City Centers

Social media, which changes the way that we perceive our physical surroundings, currently corresponds to a tool that has the power to reshape the image of the city in the digital environment through a digitally reproduced city. Visual-based social media platforms play a significant role in the process of reshaping and reproduction. The current study aims to research and understand the layers of the digital image of a (digital) city, as reflected and reproduced on social media, firstly through a content analysis on Instagram. For this purpose, we collected samples of the images/videos posted between May and July 2021 in Konak and Bayraklı, the existing and prospective city centers of Izmir. Secondly, we surveyed social media users who previously had physical and/or digital experience of these city centers. With this sample data, we proposed a new categorization to understand the digital image of the (digital) city in a parallel way to the classical Lynchian theory. In the end, it was seen that, in the digital realm, there is a digital city that needs to be defined and categorized according to its peculiar characteristics, and the image of this city is user-generated whose process evolves (inter)subjectively through different categories.