Commodification of the Urban Community Image: An Instagram Case Study of Motivational Quotes and Skyscraper Photo

Rapid technology advancements, particularly social media Instagram, have brought people’s daily lives and urban environments into the domain of visual culture. Instagram’s young users were sharing motivational quotes adopted in activities and work using a skyscraper as a background. The trend of encouraging quotes and skyscraper photographs exemplified the community’s orientation, which referred to a lifestyle or a typical phenomenon of Indonesian urban culture. This article intended to investigate the image of society by using Instagram to post encouraging phrases and patterns of space production-consumption using images of buildings taken by young people. Purposive sampling was used to track the snapgram of young employees who are also fresh graduates. To enrich the research outcomes, the data was processed utilizing the social semiotic methodology and a qualitative approach. Guy Debord’s Spectacle of Society (1967) theory and the postmodernist perspective are also discussed. According to the findings of the paper, there are attempts to achieve a higher lifestyle as a representation of urban society through the uploading of images of work and buildings. On the one hand, an idealized and artistically portrayal of communal life and urban space existed, while on the other side a city with a dense population is ignored. This study is limited to the social media platform Instagram and the Jakarta metropolitan area in Indonesia. There has never been a conversation about the convergence of urban settings with social media as a spectacle before.