Intimate platform biographies on, off and underneath Instagram

For 15 years Instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of creating and sharing images. Across that time, users’ profiles became archives that offer a biography of their lives, their visual practices and the platform itself. In this article we use a novel combination of data donation, computational and scroll back interview methods to develop an intimate form of platform biography centred on users’ archives. We draw on 22 co-analysis interviews with participants who have used Instagram for a sustained period of time as part of their creative work or practice. Participants scrolled back through their Instagram profile, manually sorted 500 images printed out from their Instagram archive, and explored a machine visualisation of the algorithmic clustering of their entire archive. We propose three orientations participants take in reflecting on their personal, creative and professional use of Instagram: creative work and their everyday life, the curation of eras of their lives, and creative experiments with the flow afforded by Instagram’s algorithmic and ephemeral feeds. We argue these orientations help to articulate the value that Instagram users place on their archives, and their enduring use of the platform, in relation to its algorithmic, promotional and creator cultures.