#blessedsunday

This week I took my research a step further and looked at the hashtag “#blessedSunday” to specify that I wanted to look at what people posted with thought towards the most holy day of the week. The three pictures broke down as such:

1.     “#lastSunday #catholicchurch #churchgoers #blessedSunday #mybabies #coco #chanelle #Bolton#” The picture is, as attached below, of two little girls who are apparently at church. This associates the hashtag with the user going to a church service and having a religious experience.

2.     “Breakfast! #food #pancakes #HotCoco #McDo #BlessedSunday” This picture is of Mc Donald’s packaging, with the location as “Mc Donald’s La Salle”. This implies that the person feels blessed to enjoy the food that they are eating on that Sunday morning, not having much to do with a typical religious experience.

3.     “Sleepy mode si babe….nanay nya daw ako @_____ #blessedsunday #blueleafeventsplace #happiness #babe” This is a picture of what seems to be a couple. The male has his head on the females shoulder and his eyes are closed and they are both smiling a little bit. This picture implies that the user feels blessed to be with that person.

The primary message about religion in each of the examples is that there is no official way to display religion on Instagram. There are, however, many different and personal ways that users apply feeling blessed to their lives. The pattern is that users are posting the things that make them feel the most blessed in their lives at that moment and they often associate these pictures with thankfulness. Most of the posts are happy. However, there is little pattern in regards to what people write along with their posts. Sometimes it implies feeling blessed by God, and other times there is the implication that the person is thinking in a secular way. The posts often have to do with other people that the user cares about.  This is fairly similar to my previous findings, even though I changed the hash tag a little bit. While I did get one post about being at church, the other two posts did not express being at church but mainly just feeling thankful or happy as in the examples that were seen previously. The main lesson learned in every single bit of research I have done is that Instagram is a place where users post things that is unique to their lives and what makes them feel either a connection to God or makes them think for some reason of the word blessed. 

Research Question

In my research about the use of #blessed Instagram, I have identified that users post their feelings about being “blessed” in a variety of different ways. The most common theme among the posts that I have observed is that most posts involve gratitude, meaning that many of the posts talk about that user being thankful for a variety of different reasons. There is also a common theme of associating #blessed with a selfie, or a picture of oneself. Many times, when a user is posting a selfie they use it to promote themselves looking pretty or to have a chance to post a caption along with the picture. There are also differences that I have observed in my research. First of all, people post such different pictures to represent #blessed that it is hard to identify one underlying common theme of all of the pictures. Second, it is hard to determine that the users mean the same thing when they use the word blessed. While in many cases it can be assumed that the word blessed is related to Christianity, there are certain posts that make me question whether or not the user is identifying with Christianity or something else. Overall, it seems that when a post involves the word blessed, the user is implying that whatever they have posted a picture of or written a caption about is special and meaningful to them as an individual. These posts have also expressed that people feel blessed around special events such as birthdays and anniversaries. The question I pose is this, How do Instagram users post in ways that uniquely express how they feel blessed in their every day life? This study has mainly shown me that there are extremely different ways to present your religion on Instagram. I will further look at how people use #blessed on Sundays, as Sunday is the most holy day in Christianity.