ADDA 5: ANA E. SANCHO-ORTIZ EXAMINES SCIENCE DISSEMINATION IN INFLUENCER DISCOURSE ON INSTAGRAM

Our colleague Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz participated in ADDA 5, a conference that was held from the 21st to the 23rd of May 2025. It was hosted in the MindLabs building in Tilburg (The Netherlands) and was thematically centred on “Discourse and Digital Infrastructures”.

There, Ana E. Sancho-Ortiz presented a paper entitled “Science dissemination on Instagram: Exploring the role of influencer practices in the discourse of physiotherapy experts”. She shared and discussed the findings from a twofold analysis of a sample of Instagram posts from individual profiles by looking into format and pragmatic actions. Her presentation contributed to throwing light on the potential hybridisation of discursive practices of science experts and influencers.

You can find the abstract of her talk here:

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Science dissemination on Instagram: Exploring the role of influencer practices in the discourse of physiotherapy experts

The current conceptualisation of science as a social asset has encouraged the scientific community to prioritise the accessibility of knowledge within the scientific endeavour (Kupper et al., 2021). Diverse digital media have therefore been explored by expert communities as means to engage wider audiences, with social media platforms standing out due to their vast reachability and content scalability (boyd, 2010). The widespread use of social media for science dissemination has prompted the need to address the impact which new trends in social media communication might have on knowledge dissemination practices, particularly in light of the proliferation of ‘influencers’ (Abidin, 2015) and ‘lifestyle guru’ (Baker & Rojek, 2020) profiles.

Considering the growing relevance of influencer discourse in social media (Georgakopoulou & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, 2024), this contribution approaches knowledge dissemination discourse on Instagram as potentially shaped by influencer discursive practices. Specifically, it draws on Abidin’s (2016) notion of relatability to discursively, pragmatically, and multimodally analyse 40 posts extracted from four individual profiles of experts on physiotherapy (10 posts each). Preliminary findings point to the adoption of relatability-oriented practices which are characteristic of microcelebrities (Senft, 2013; Marwick, 2013). These practices include requests for audience feedback and the commercialised advertising of products, both established as closing moves in the post’s caption and multimedia, as well as references to personal experience, instantiated through the introduction of self-mentions and emotional markers. Such an adaptation of microcelebrity practices may indicate the emergence of a quasi-scientific discourse marked by the hybridisation of conventional scientific and new influencer discourses.

References

Abidin, C. (2015) Communicative ❤ intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness. Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, 8, 1-16. http://dx.doi.org/10.7264/N3MW2FFG
Abidin, C. (2016). Please Subscribe!: Influencers, Social Media, and the Commodification of Everyday Life. Doctoral Thesis.
Baker, S. & Rojek, C. (2020). Lifestyle Gurus. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boyd, D. (2010). Social Network Sites as Networked Publics: Affordances, Dynamics, and Implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.) Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites (pp. 39–58). Routledge.

Georgakopoulou, A. & Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, P. (2024). Affect, hate and relationality in the discourse of, with and about influencers. In P. Garcés-Conejos Blitvich, A. Georgakopoulou (Eds.) Influencer Discourse: affective relations and identities (pp. 1–18). John Benjamins https://doi.org/10.1075/pbns.349.int
Kupper, J. F. H., Moreno, C. and Fornetti, A. (2021). Rethinking science communication in a changing landscape JCOM 20(03), E. https://doi.org/10.22323/2.20030501
Marwick, A. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press.
Senft, T. M. (2013). Microcelebrity and the Branded Self. In J. Hartley AM, J. Burgess, A. Bruns (Eds.) A companion to new media dynamics, 346–354. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781118321607.ch22