AESLA 2024: Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz explores expert identity in X and Instagram
Our team member Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz participated in the 41º Congreso Internacional de la Asociación Española de Lingüística Aplicada (AESLA), celebrated on the 17-29th April 2024 at the Universitat Politècnica de València (Valencia, Spain). With her talk “Expert identity construction on social media: An X-Instagram cross-platform analysis”, she aimed to identify similar or differentiated patterns in the enactment of a multifaceted, expert identity looking at the reliance on X and Instagram affordances. Based on this, a consistency was identified in the way experts exploit verbal and non-verbal resources to craft similar (or even identical) caption and media content on their social media posts. Thus, both platforms seem to be complementarily used to show personal and non-personal facets of the expert’s identity.
You can read the abstract of her talk below:
EXPERT IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION ON SOCIAL MEDIA: AN X-INSTAGRAM CROSS-PLATFORM ANALYSIS
Contemporary scientific communication has experienced a shift towards the exploration of digital platforms as avenues for the generation and dissemination of knowledge. Experts leverage digital platforms to enhance the visibility of their research (Lores & Diani, 2021) and “build a coexistent in-group persona within given professional communities” (Pascual et al. 2023: 11). In this sense, identity construction has become central in online communication studies, particularly owing to the abundant multisemiotic resources exploitable for this matter (Bou-Franch & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2019; Yus 2019). This study approaches expert identity enactment on social media as a multifaceted construct arising from the manifestation of the professional and personal characters inherent to individual expert users. Specifically, it addresses identity construction on X and Instagram, focusing on the articulation of professional and personal views through media and caption content. Thus, it presents a qualitative analysis of the pertinent verbal and visual resources used in identity enactment within 30 Instagram posts and 40 X platform posts. These posts were extracted from the accounts of two experts on physiotherapy, each comprising 15 and 20 posts respectively. Preliminary results suggest a notable consistency in identity construction across both platforms, with a marked tendency towards cross-platform ‘reposting’, i.e. uploading identical content on both sites. Nonetheless, the analysis also reveals a potential discrepancy in the conceptualization of social media use between the accounts. While one presents a prevalence of subjective language (namely evaluative language and emotion-conveying facemoji), the other shows a predominance of technical terminology, graph-based infographics and impersonal language forms.