Sammendrag
Digital nomads are highly mobile professionals who work while traveling and travel while working. Their lifestyle has gained increasing academic attention, also from a communication perspective. Digital tools in general and social media in particular constitute an important part of digital nomads’ routines, with many of them frequently engaged in private-facing (e.g., WhatsApp, Snapchat), community-facing (e.g., Facebook groups, MeetUp), and public-facing (e.g., Twitter, Instagram) platforms. Despite initial work on the topic, little is known about the self-presentation and self-branding practices of digital nomads on social media. To address this lack of evidence and focusing on Instagram as a key platform for this group, we adopt a Goffmanian perspective. We provide an in-depth analysis of qualitative interviews with DNs on their self-presentational practices, specifically their content strategies, use of platform affordances, and imagined audience. The interviews include photo elicitation as a central element and are complemented by a computational content analysis of the interviewees’ Instagram posts (both image and text data). The findings show how digital nomads highlight independence and freedom, de-emphasize work in favour of leisure and travel, greatly value the flexibility and ephemerality of the Stories feature, and develop audience management strategies that are mindful of the imagined audiences’ situation, while trying to foster reliability and authenticity.
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