Visibility and Invisibility: Self-Presentation in Plog Social Media

Plog (Picture Blog)作为读图时代视觉传播的新形式，以图文结合的方式使照片背后不可见的信息通过文字变得可见，是当代青年在社交媒体进行自我展演的新手段。然而其“可见”是经过大量修饰的，是权力规训下的“不可见”，而自我展演正是一种对真实的遮蔽，这与社交媒体的可见性研究以及景观社会理论所强调的视觉传播化统治的内涵是相契合的。因此，本文以景观社会为理论基础，运用网络民族志的研究方法，以Plog的可见性为研究对象来分析社交媒体中的自我展演行为，以探析图像景观背后对真实的遮蔽。As a new form of visual communication in the picture-reading era, Plog (picture blog) makes the invisible information behind photos visible through the combination of images and text, serving as a new means for contemporary youth to perform self-presentation on social media. However, such “visibility” is heavily curated, representing an “invisibility” under the discipline of power. Self-performance in this context inherently conceals authenticity, which aligns with the connotations of visibility research in social media and the theory of the Society of the Spectacle—both emphasizing the dominance of visual communication. Therefore, this paper takes the Society of the Spectacle as its theoretical foundation, employs netnography as the research method, and focuses on the visibility of Plog to analyze self-performance behaviors in social media, aiming to explore how the spectacle of images conceals reality.