Capturing the Ephemeral: A Feminist Methodological Reflection on the Ethics of Studying Instagram Stories

Instagram stories are an ephemeral format, having only a 24-hour lifespan. What are the ethical considerations while using Stories (or similarly slippery digital artefacts) in research, particularly if gaining explicit consent is not feasible? In thinking of data collection methodologies as “practices of care,” I suggest that a self-reflexive, feminist approach to this issue, must critically interrogate what constitutes public data, or even a public profile, considering not only the size of its following, but also the poster’s self-presentation and intersectional identity; and interrogate both what the platform (dis)allows, as well as commonsensical understandings of platforms-in-use. Recognizing the limits of “privacy” as a framework, I propose the alternative framework of “intimacy,” and suggest that researchers should do the labor of cultivating this intimacy with the human creators behind digital data by understanding their “digital bodily assemblages.” Finally, I propose a set of questions researchers may consult when studying ephemeral data, considering issues around five key areas: informed consent, the publicness of data, the identity of the poster, platform affordances and practices, and researchers’ positionality.