La centralità di Instagram nelle narrazioni contemporanee tra transmedia storytelling e contenuti grassroots

Abstract

The paper aims to emphasize the definition of new ways of involvement, experience and participation for users of Internet – always on (Baron, 2008; Boccia Artieri, 2012) – reflecting on the centrality of a platform such as Instagram, and with it on the use of grassroots contents (Boccia Artieri, 2012; Jenkins et al., 2013) in contemporary transmedia storytelling processing (Jenkins 2003, 2006, 2009, 2013). The possibility offered by the transmedia to expand the knowledge of imaginative universes (Jenkins, 2009), to give birth to complex ones (Giovagnoli, 2013) and to promote a multiliteracy (Scolari, 2009) goes well with the changed characteristics of the publics, who assume an increasingly active role towards the media products they consume and in general toward the media. They become in fact prosumers, giving life to a form of participatory engagement (and in a broader sense participatory cultures), engaging in shared culture and knowledge processes, through logics of social exchange and media reception acts (Ito, 2008) and being actively involved in narrative processes (Scolari, 2017). From this perspective, it is necessary    to understand why social networks are fundamental in transmedia storytelling and why specifically Instagram has now an increasingly role in the storytelling of the contemporary media landscape. Several companies and subjects from other fields use social networks (and Instagram) to involve their publics, redefining how they interact with them, expanding their universe through these platforms and enriching the users experience. By a socio-mediological approach, with also practice examples, will be examined the use and the increasingly importance of Instagram in contemporary transmedia storytelling, with its cultural and communicative processes, learning how this platform foresee the expansion of imaginative universes, also with the production of grassroots contents and UGC