Instagram use and local community experience: paths towards Sense of Place and Sense of Community

In modern local communities, individuals get conflicting representations about social meanings, which seem available yet not attainable due to community social and environmental features. In the long run, this makes them look for different paths towards local social dimensions according to the constraints posed by their community. Among these paths, ubiquitous social media emerge since they allow users to merge online and offline environments. Thus, Instagram community-related use was deepened as a potential path towards local social meanings, enhancing users’ bond to their community as a set of meaningful places and as a relational entity at last. An online questionnaire was administered to 525 Italian Instagram users. Multiple sequential mediation analyses showed that using Instagram to look at social places and gatherings in one’s city associates with more social representations about that city, and through them, to stronger Sense of Place and Sense of Community. That is, this specific Instagram practice allows users to feel that their community offers plenty of places and opportunities to meet new people; through sustaining the feeling that local places are meaningful to local social life, it also enhances users’ positive attitude towards common places in their city, and, at last, their bond to their city as a social entity whose members relate to each other and can be seen out and about too. While deepening a recent path towards local social meanings, these results also suggest that the latter represent a critical dimension to rely on to foster citizens’ tie to their local communities.