Semiotics of consumer identity of most popular Iranian users of Instagram

The purpose of this research work is to analyze the semiotics of popular Iranian users' pages on Instagram, as a network with more than one billion active users per month, covering the consumption showcasing topics. A large number of users spend most of their time on Instagram, browsing the pages of influencers and therefore, the answer to the question of what can be obtained by semiotically examining their pages, will help to find out the prevailing taste of Instagram users. In this study, Kress and Van Lyon's semiotics method was used to analyze the images and the focus of this research was on the images that Instagram has made them viral. Based on this criteria, 900 images from pages with a large audience, with different identity representation, were analyzed from the targeted sampling and with theoretical saturation criteria. The findings of this research show that two main types can be identified in this representation of identity. In both types, there are characteristics of consumerism. These two types can be divided into direct consumerist and thoughtful consumerist identity.