Social media platforms have had a tangible effect on how users share information and their digital literacy skills. Infographics are often shared on Instagram, but they harbour the potential for misinformation. Users do not always research posts before sharing, and the social nature of the site influences user behaviour. Current digital literacy…

In recent years, social media such as YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram have become an essential part of the everyday lives of children and young adults. Integrating elements of these social media into higher education may have the potential to enhance situational intrinsic learning motivation through the emotional design and proximity to students'…

iPhoneography is the practice of capturing, enhancing, and sharing images using a smartphone device. With the emergence of image-based social media platforms that highlight the experience of making images, it becomes critical to examine how the act of creating images enhances comprehension of visuals. The practice of iPhoneography and image-based…

This study explores advertising students' recognition and comprehension of in-feed native advertising on Instagram, a leading platform for social media native advertising. Data were collected from 303 U.S. college advertising students. It examines the impact of two key aspects of Instagram in-feed native advertising--an additional label…

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained higher education institutions, especially small Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As campuses closed and reopened, Black communities' digital divide grew, adding to the need to stay connected. This study uses social capital to examine how institutions use language, tone, content, and…

Images are part of the communication strategies of both the hegemonic powers and political activism. Images have recently been the focus of studies on social movements, highlighting the importance of visual activism in social media. However, the relationship between these visual narratives and mythological structures and how they operate to…

Video ethics in educational research involving children is a recent topic that has arisen since the increase in the use of visual mediums in research (such as photovoice and video) especially with the development of new and ubiquitous internet technologies and social media. This paper emerged as an expressed concerned by a group of scholars…

Many students are actively involved with social networking sites; they follow friends in virtual worlds and post personal information and photographs online daily. Although they may not realize it, students are publicly "documenting" their private lives on social media to allow others to learn about them. Understanding documentation as a…

This paper applied a social semiotic lens toward investigating the metonymic representations repeatedly displayed on the Instagram official account and the Instagram blog. The main source of data were 90 photos gathered from ten "Weekend Hashtag Projects" (WHPs), a weekly photo challenge organized by the Instagram team. The multimodal…

Given the emergence of a specific trope in social network services, whereby individuals upload an image that includes a passport and/or a boarding pass to index their status as a traveller, this article explores multilingual and multimodal creativity in the construction of identity by a body of individuals who pass through Paris' Orly airport. In…

This study aimed to investigate what cultural meanings English language learners (ELLs) attributed to the selected digital photographs and how they interpreted these photographs at the intersection of 'my culture' and 'other culture' dichotomy. This qualitative study was carried out during the fall term of 2020-2021 at a state university in…

Richard Prince a well-known appropriation artist, made headlines by pressing ever deeper into the gray areas of art, technology, and the law. Specifically, Prince took screenshots of personal photographs that were publicly displayed on Instagram accounts, included his own comments, enlarged and printed them on large canvases, and displayed them at…

Middle and high school students interact via powerful social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat. Social media platforms are sometimes misused, resulting in cyberbullying and sexting that could adversely affect many in the school community. School counsellors, school psychologists, and educators are uniquely positioned to…

Social media has quickly become an integral part of day-to-day interaction for many university students. This exploratory study investigated the use of the social media site Instagram for written discussions in three introductory French classes (n= 83). Specifically, student perception on the role of image as a mediational tool (Vygotsky, 1978) to…

Although students and adults alike are constantly exposed to visuals both online and offline, merely being exposed to visuals does not guarantee visual literacy (Kedra & Zakeviciute, 2019). This study explored K12 teachers' perceptions regarding their personal and instructional use of online images as well as the influence of a visual literacy…