| Abstrakt: |
In recent years, social media data have been used in the analysis of nature within the concept of cultural ecosystem services (CES). From the viewpoint of CES, social media posts that contain content about nature are read as virtual human–environment interactions and conclusions are drawn on how humans perceive, interact with and value the natural environment. We argue that these analyses often lack a deeper understanding of the inherent mechanisms of social media and the sociocultural dimension of the users who produce this data. In this light, we evaluated social media posts that show images of species and landscapes in the bid to gain an understanding of the cultural processing of nature-based posts in digital social networks. We conducted the study using the popular social media platform Instagram. By analysing 124 profiles and conducting five semi-structured interviews, we examined how Instagram posts that focus on nature (in terms of species and natural landscapes) are portrayed online and how these posts are utilized as a cultural entity for self-presentation purposes. Based on this empirical data, we provide a critical perspective on the use of ‘nature posts’ on Instagram for analysing CES. Our results show that nature-focused Instagram posts are a cultural media performance forming contexts of meaning with which human subjects interact. Furthermore, these posts underlie a perceived affordance where the user’s social media practices are essentially tied back to mechanisms of recognition and have to be understood as self-promotions. Images on Instagram that show species and natural landscapes are being used here as an image resource for the purpose of expressing social distinction. Therefore, we particularly argue for a stronger collaboration between the natural, social and cultural sciences to overcome the difference in terms of understanding, analysing and promoting values of nature and CES. |
