Identifying Hashtag Cultures to Study the Construction of Childhood Image and Parents’ Aspirations

This study considers posting behavior as a cultural practice as enacted with Instagram postings marked by hashtags #fashionkids and #letthekids and examines whether and how the two hashtags reflect two distinct online cultures about childhood. The study is important for two reasons. First, it offers socio-cultural theory to the study of social media and provides researchers with a theory-based method of using Instagram as a data source to detect and study digital cultures. Second, it contributes to the research activities on the phenomena of sharenting and the changing narrative of childhood in domestic contexts. The inquiry included analyses of the scale of a sample of Instagram postings with hashtags of #fashionkids and #letthekids posted in a 12-day period in 2016, geographical locations where the postings were made, searches of words with linguistic functions in captions, and networking strategies. Analysis of the scale, the networking patterns, the verbal accounts, and the geographical locations where the postings happened help inform us about the magnitude and diverse purposes of the hashtags. Overall, the findings underscore greater diversity among #letthekids posts compared to the more focused content of #fashionkids’ postings.