Digital Self-Representation In Insta Poetry And Online Literary Expression: Audience Participation And Platform Power

Abstract

1. The expansion of social media has transformed the material, cultural and communicative conditions of literary production. Insta-poetry, broadly understood as poetry designed for or substantially circulated through social-media environments, demonstrates this transformation particularly clearly because poetic meaning is produced through the interaction of words, typography, images, captions, hashtags, performance and audience response. This conceptual paper examines digital self-representation in Insta-poetry and online literary expression, with particular attention to identity performance, multimodality, audience participation, algorithmic visibility and platform power. Drawing on performativity, platform-affordance theory and multimodal discourse perspectives, the paper undertakes a qualitative conceptual analysis of representative practices associated with Instagram and short-form video poetry, including Nigerian digital-poetic practices. The analysis shows that digital self-representation is neither purely spontaneous self-expression nor merely strategic branding. Rather, it is a recursive process in which lived experience is selected, compressed, visually encoded, published, interpreted and fed back through audience interaction and platform metrics. The Nigerian dimension demonstrates that digital poetry can also carry indigenous oral aesthetics, code-switching, social commentary and activist concerns into global networked publics. The paper argues that the principal contribution of Insta-poetry lies in its ability to expand literary participation while simultaneously subjecting poetic visibility to platform logics. It recommends multimodal digital-literacy approaches, culturally responsive literary pedagogy and greater scholarly attention to algorithmic conditions of literary visibility