Objects in Focus: Museum Visitors and Instagram

While there is increasingly widespread use of social media by those visiting museum exhibitions relatively little is understood about this practice. Further still, the focus of such practices is unknown yet research in this area can reveal much about how visitors using applications driven by smart phone technology are engaging with exhibition content, space, design, architecture and people. This article draws on a case study of one exhibition using visual content analysis to frame, explore and interpret visual and text based posts by visitors using the social media application, Instagram, as part of their experience. Findings suggest that museum visitors using this application do so to account for and record details of their experience that draws attention to exhibition content, specifically objects. The implications are extensive for cultural institutions given the uptake of social media in all corners of life, with museums and galleries being a lively context for social media use via mobile technologies.