Vera is a 29-year-old lifestyle influencer from Prague. When she wanted to announce a new relationship to her Instagram followers, she posted a close-up of her hand intertwined with her boyfriend’s hand to her Instagram stories.[1] “I didn’t feel like making any big announcement, this is quite new and he’s not really into all this Instagram stuff,” she tells me later in a direct message. She also didn’t want to post a selfie with her boyfriend as she didn’t feel comfortable showing his face. But she liked the symbolics of them holding hands. It felt subtle, tender—not a big, flashy announcement, just a joyous sign of intimacy to post and to share with her followers without revealing too much.

Vivi, another influencer who lives in Prague, also frequently posts pictures or short videos of holding hands with her husband. She announced their engagement three years ago in the same way—by posting a picture of her and her then fiancé holding hands. In the picture, the engagement ring is visible and Vivi is smiling happily. She mentioned on numerous occasions that her husband doesn’t use social media and prefers to protect his own privacy. She only very rarely shows his face on her Instagram profile followed by almost 50,000 people. But she posts pictures and videos of his hands quite often.

Boyfriends’ and husbands’ hands are one of the two most frequently employed symbolic uses of hands in my research with Czech women influencers on Instagram. Second in popularity, at least among my research partners, are children’s hands. Vera’s good friend Petra recently gave birth to her first son. She shared her pregnancy journey with her 25,000 followers regularly. The first picture she shared of her son was of her holding his hand, the contrast of an adult hand and the baby hand conveying so much of the fragility and intimacy of the first days of being with a newborn baby.

It is not random that hands on Instagram mostly represent those who are closest to those who post them—husbands, partners, children, immediate family, the loved ones. In this way, photos and videos of hands are used by influencers to produce and reproduce a sense of intimacy within the parasocial relationship with their followers. Vivi, Vera, and Petra are professional influencers, which means that their income depends solely on their capability to appear authentic, relatable, and accessible to their followers. The sense of intimacy plays a key role in the authentic performance on Instagram. Authenticity, consequently, is a key aspect of influencers’ long-term success and is also seen as an aspirational goal both by themselves as well as by their followers (Heřmanová 2023). Crystal Abidin (2015) points out, that these “communicative intimacies” playing out between influencers and their followers are not exclusive with the often commercial nature of the relationship. Even though the relationship is based on influencing followers’ consumption patterns and decisions, intimate and emotional connections are formed and felt on both sides.

As Vera herself noted, when she talked about sharing something without revealing too much, influencers need to establish a certain level of intimacy with their followers to stay authentic and relatable. At the same time, they also constantly balance this need with their own vulnerability and the needs of people close to them. Hands are used by influencers because of their symbolic nature, they can convey (a needed or desired) ambivalence—representing both openness and intimacy at once. Hands portray intimacy and closeness, simultaneously protecting privacy.

Hands holding or embracing, fingers bearing engagement rings or other symbols of close relationships reveal intimate and personal information to the onlookers. Still, hands are less revealing than eyes, mouths, or whole faces. Hands can tell an intimate story without spilling too much detail. In this way, babies’ or boyfriends’ hands allow Vera, Vivi and Petra to communicate with their followers the little, gentle joys of their everyday lives, without feeling like they are exposing themselves and making their loved ones vulnerable to the ever-present internet trolling and hate. Keeping followers close, but not too close.

Highly aestheticized pictures of hands have been used on Instagram since the very beginning of the influencer culture. As content creators building their personal brands (and their economic capital) around the capability to communicate meaningfully with vast audiences, influencers employ the symbolism of hands as a communicative and representative tool. In many instances, the symbolic language established by content creators becomes part of the internet vernacular. A good example of how hands specifically became a widely used communicative symbol is when the now legendary Instagram account @followmeto started by Murad Osmann in 2011 posted a simple picture of his then girlfriend Nataly holding his hand. Osmann himself was hidden behind the camera. The #followmeto hashtag expanded into a global trend.

Murad’s and Nataly’s posts have been copied by thousands of other influencers as well as by random Instagram users. Sonya, one of my research participants who is a travel influencer, also used the #followmeto template for her pictures a few times. “It’s a bit of a cliché at this point, but I sort of like the story behind it. Like, you are there with someone, he’s there, holding your hand, you are exploring the world together,” she writes when I ask her about it.

Hands on screen have become a powerful symbol of everyday digital intimacies and established part of the vernacular language of social media. Like Sonya, we all like the stories behind the pictures­—stories belonging to the bodies attached to virtual hands. Those bodies are cropped from the frames, yet still accessible to us via the intimacy of (digital) hands.

Notes

Abidin, Crystal. 2015. “Communicative ❤ Intimacies: Influencers and Perceived Interconnectedness.” Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology 8.

Heřmanová, Marie. Forthcoming. “‘I’m Always Telling You My Honest Opinion’: Influencers and Gendered Authenticity Strategies on Instagram.” In Cultures of Authenticity, edited by Marie Heřmanová, Michael Skey, and Thomas Thurnell-Read. London: Emerald Publishing.