#immersive: A Multimodal Discourse Analysis of User Engagement with Immersive Event Brands on Instagram
Master of Arts dissertation
ABSTRACT
Among the research conducted on social media sharing, a gap exists focussing specifically on the forms of communication and engagement that participants of immersive events use to share their experiences. With the desire to fulfil the needs of an agentic, participatory consumer of media artefacts and the resultant emergence of immersive events as a popular form of audience engagement, an understanding of the way these consumers choose to use various social networking sites in relation to their experiences can clarify the relationship between the two. A multimodal discourse analysis of Instagram posts made by attendees of Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More (2011-) and Secret Cinema’s presentations of Blade Runner (2018) and Romeo + Juliet (2018) reveals insights into the nature of communication among a brand community on this platform. Through focussing on networked communities on this specific platform, new findings emerge which contribute to the literature surrounding fan communities, contradicting past findings that focus on text-centric social networking sites. This study reinforces uses and gratifications research that deems Instagram a platform most suited to ideal-self-presentation, both due to technical affordances as well as meaning constellations constructed by users of multiple social networking sites. The resulting discourse analysed in this study suggests that while communities of devoted fans of immersive brands thrive in other online spaces, as past research has uncovered, the nature of communication on Instagram means that attendees of these events use the platform for a different type of communication. This study’s analysis of the forms of communication used by participants of immersive events on Instagram reveals the need to understand how each site relates to, and differs from, each other for a truly holistic picture of the discourse of a networked fan community and the resultant narrative that is co-created by brands and those engaging with them.