Capturing a crisis: Exploring individuals' Instagram use during the beginning stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

In the first half of the year 2020, images of the COVID-19 pandemic dominated frontpages and primetime news: empty streets, overcrowded hospitals and panic-buying reflected the chaos and great uncertainty of this global health crisis. Since the advent of the Web 2.0, however, it has been not only traditional news media that shape the imagery of such historical events, but also people's social media accounts which show what individuals are experiencing at a specific time and deem shareworthy. To identify prevalent COVID-19 imagery on Instagram, this digital ethnography assesses the posting behavior of 47 internet users in Switzerland and the United States during the early stages of the pandemic. This study combines findings from a qualitative content analysis of 2,698 posts and interviews with 19 creators to address the following research questions: (1) What content related to the pandemic did Instagram users share with their followers? And, (2) why did these indi-viduals log on to Instagram during the COVID-19 pandemic? Overall, we found six COV-ID-19-related themes in the Feed and Story posts, which predominantly reflected changes to participants' personal lives, including visual changes to everyday scenery. Furthermore, the individuals in our sample captured the COVID-19-related themes from an overwhelmingly positive angle. Answering our second question, we found that logging onto Instagram helped our participants feel part of "something bigger" during a time of social isolation. We discuss these findings in the context of the platform's affordances and conventions and con-tribute to the thus far limited literature on the uses and gratifications of Instagram and indi-viduals' use of an image-based social networking site during a traumatic event.