“Visibility Work” in College: How Class and Capital Shape Student Profiles on Instagram

Abstract How does social class shape students’ social media presence in college? Scholarship has focused on the ways lower-income and historically marginalized students use social media to seek out information about college, yet less attention is paid to the ways social class informs how, where, and what students choose to post about themselves online during this period. Drawing on 40 interviews with undergraduates at a flagship university in the United States, I offer “visibility work” as a way to conceptualize how individuals strategize and manage the extent to which their lives are visible online. With a focus on Instagram, I show how students’ visibility work in college is classed. While higher income students practiced proactive and consistently aesthetic visibility work on their Instagram profiles in order to scaffold in-person relationships and expedite social capital accumulation, lower-income students engaged in visibility work on their Instagram profiles that was reactive and sporadic by comparison. Having economic, social, and cultural capital produced an ease of visibility on the Instagram profile that students believed furthered their capital accumulation throughout college. This research advances scholarship in both sociology and digital studies by showing how online visibility is a mechanism of capital accumulation shaped by social class.