Visual artists and digital storytelling in social networking environments

Visual artists increasingly make use of digital means to promote artworks or artistic identities. One such digital means is Instagram, a Web 2.0 platform that has gained importance in the art world over the last decades. Web 2.0 platforms allow users to convey information (narratively), thereby engaging audiences. Digital storytelling has become a buzzword in this respect, and is often discussed in the literature regarding its effects on personal online reputation and consumer-brand connections. It is argued that visual artists are individuals who master branding activities for the sake of managing artistic identities, and are therefore relevant to discuss in the light of digital storytelling. However, the definition of digital storytelling is in need of further clarification. In the context of visual artists in online environments, digital storytelling is defined here as the act of visually presenting the artistic self and/or the personal self, often alongside other agents, objects or phenomena, through multiple varying and engaging SNS posts that together form a certain kind of (ongoing) chronological structure about artistic events, actions and/or outcomes. Following this definition of the concept and a deductive analysis of a sample of the nine most recent posts of 103 visual artists’ Instagram pages, this thesis concludes that visual artists deploy digital storytelling in online environments. By use of an explorative qualitative thematic content analysis, five categories of digital storytelling are extracted from a sample, which are (1) work in progress; (2) exhibition; (3) artist’s journey; (4) project and (5) inspiration. The findings of this thesis highlight the various ways in which visual artists convey digital stories within each of the themes, and may serve as a base of further research on (visual) artists’ use, and the effects of that use, of Web 2.0 platforms from an institutional or social perspective.