Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes, Images, and Media Ideologies of Value

This article elucidates how some users of the app Instagram follow particular rules—shaped by the medium's material constraints and affordances as well as social norms and pressures—to get as many likes as possible. I demonstrate how my interlocutors, young adult women in the United States, strategize their Instagram usage with creative practices in an effort to successfully accrue likes. But the pressure to perform in such a way lead some of...