Selected Papers of #AoIR2023:  

The 24th Annual Conference of the  
Association of Internet Researchers 

Philadelphia, PA, USA / 18-21 Oct 2023 
 
 

 

Suggested Citation (APA): Turvy, A. (2023, October). Potholes and Power: A Multimodal Critical 
Discourse Analysis of ‘Look At This F*ckin’ Street’ on Instagram. Paper presented at AoIR2023: The 24th 
Annual Conference of the Association of Internet Researchers. Philadelphia, PA, USA: AoIR. Retrieved 
from http://spir.aoir.org. 

POTHOLES AND POWER: A MULTIMODAL CRITICAL DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF 
‘LOOK AT THIS F*CKIN’ STREET’ ON INSTAGRAM 
 
Alex Turvy 
Tulane University 
 
Introduction 
 
New Orleans’ municipal government is plagued by a crisis of trust due to systemic 
failures across city services and infrastructure. This has created fertile ground for 
citizens to discursively challenge the underlying power relationship through connective 
action. Look At This Fuckin’ Street (LATFS) is an Instagram account based in New 
Orleans with a stated mission of “documenting the cracked and sinking streets of the 
Crescent City.”  The account tends to use humor and visuals in tandem to effectively 
create a more publicly accountable visual version of 311. Relying on user submissions, 
it functions as a crowdsourced and real-time collection of the most egregious examples 
of deteriorating streets and sidewalks, failed repairs, and the like. The account manager 
insists on public anonymity, but I received direct non-anonymous access to the 
manager for the purpose of this research along with full access to the entirety of the 
account’s data.  
 
Literature Review 
 
The case study offered here aims to contribute to scholarship across three primary 
areas. First, I argue that LATFS represents a novel approach to political engagement on 
social media as a hyperlocal phenomenon that uses connective action (Bennett and 
Segerberg 2012) fueled by humor and shaming to challenge the power of the municipal 
government. Second, I contribute to ongoing work around digital media and urban 
space via analyzing how citizens as Instagram users engage in the ongoing shaping 
and reshaping of the city through LATFS. Boy and Uitermark (2017) call this 
‘reassembling’ and focus on how this occurs recursively via mobilizing representation of 
specific places. Third, I aim to add to scholarship via a localized case study that 
foregrounds issues around maintenance and repair, the operation and politics of which 
are most often invisible (Graham and Thrift 2007). Maintenance and repair of 
infrastructure involve choices that indicate underlying values, so the LATFS discourses 



 

 

around failed infrastructure demonstrate how repair and maintenance are both an 
engine and a reflection of racism, inequality, and unequal resource allocation.  
 
Context in New Orleans 
 
The lack of trust in the municipal government has deep historical roots but is 
exacerbated by overlapping and interlocking recent instances of failure and corruption. 
The condition of road infrastructure is particularly problematic given how widespread it 
is throughout the city and the material ways that it affects nearly all citizens. These road 
issues are visible to all, often have physical consequences for vehicles, and persist 
across every neighborhood in the city. A 2017 study found that 69% of roads are in 
either poor or mediocre condition and poor road infrastructure costs New Orleans 
drivers an average of $657 in additional costs per year (TRIP 2019). 
 
Research Questions 
 
Given this context, I am interested in looking closely at LATFS to address two core 
questions: 
 
RQ1: How does LATFS serve as a discursive tool for people to challenge power 
relations between citizens and city agencies? 
 
RQ2: Considered as a means of political engagement on social media, what discursive 
and material aims is LATFS capable of addressing? 
 
Methods and Data 
 
To analyze my data, I employed multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to 
understand how the various textual and visual discourses found within LATFS challenge 
power relations within the municipal context. Foundationally, I take my approach from 
Fairclough's (2003) socio-cultural approach to critical discourse analysis (CDA), which is 
a three-dimensional framework for the analysis of text and discourse and thus views 
discourse as simultaneously a text, discourse practice, and socio-cultural practice. 
MCDA broadens analysis to all relevant discursive modalities (Machin and Mayr 2012). 
In the case of LATFS, I will consider visuals, post metadata, comments, and captions. I 
utilized an open coding process for analysis, which is based in grounded theory. 
 
Via an existing personal relationship, I gained access to the anonymous account 
manager and initially communicated via Direct Message (DM). The exported full 
account data for LATFS was downloaded on November 22nd, 2022, and was passed to 
me in unmodified .zip files directly from Instagram. The size of the total data export is 
15.9 GB. 
 
Emerging Themes 
 
I uncovered three major themes in these discourses: mocking, shaming, and exposing. 
 



 

 

There are three techniques that comprise the general approach to mockery: joking, 
silliness, and factual information. I operationalize joking as humor that is devoid of anger 
or bitterness and is often part of a collective that shares variations on a thematically or 
discursively organized joke. In contrast, silliness is defined as absurd and irreverent 
joking. Finally, ostensibly factual information is used in this category to highlight failures 
that are humorous or ironic in nature. 
 
Per Scheff (2003), I understand shame as a complex emotion that can be defined as a 
negative evaluation of oneself or one's actions that may result in feelings of inadequacy, 
inferiority, worthlessness, or humiliation. This is explicitly distinguished from guilt (a 
feeling tied to specific actions) and embarrassment, which is a shorter-term emotion 
confined to narrower social circumstances. Eight techniques characterize how LATFS 
enables shaming as a practice that seeks to undermine power: anger, bitterness, 
sarcasm, factual information, indignation, cynicism, criticizing other city services, and 
moving the account’s influence offline. 
 
Exposing most closely resembles citizen journalism, which Greer and McLaughlin 
(2010) define as the practice of everyday citizens producing and disseminating news. 
Citizen journalism is particularly important in that it gives individuals the power to 
challenge the official version of events and issues. Three techniques contribute to this. 
Just as with mocking and shaming, factual information is also employed here but with 
the intention of directly and objectively communicating facts free from emotional valence 
or editorializing about their meaning. Next, the use of explanations supports the work of 
exposing failures by describing the reasons for problems as well as (often simple) 
potential repairs. Finally, LATFS strategically employs visual framing in videos and 
images to provide fuller context on a problem and in doing so, preempts many excuses 
while highlighting the depth and scope of problems. 
 
Conclusion 
 
The findings of this analysis suggest that LATFS uses multiple discursive techniques to 
challenge the power dynamics at play in the ongoing infrastructure issues in New 
Orleans and undermine the competence and legitimacy of its municipal government. 
The account's stated mission of documenting and highlighting the cracked and sinking 
streets of the city serves as a powerful tool for amplifying the voices and concerns of 
everyday citizens and holding those in power accountable. By bringing attention to 
these issues through the dissemination of user-submitted photos and videos, the 
account creates a space for open and honest discussions about the systemic problems 
that plague the city's infrastructure. I argue that LATFS is an effective and powerful 
participatory platform for exposing a broad range of systemic problems and their 
causes, allowing residents to take back the narrative of their city’s infrastructure 
challenges, diminish and demean the powerful interests responsible, and ultimately 
attempt to reclaim the power lost to negligent or even bad-faith municipal authorities in 
New Orleans. Given the way that discourses tend to expand the critique beyond road 
infrastructure to criticism of various city services and utility monopolies, the page 
ultimately seems to serve as an outlet for frustration with a broadly dysfunctional city. 
 
  



 

 

References 

Bennett, W. Lance, and Alexandra Segerberg. 2012. “The Logic of Connective Action.” 
Information, Communication & Society 15(5):739–68.  

Boy, John D., and Justus Uitermark. 2017. “Reassembling the City through Instagram.” 
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(4):612–24. doi: 
10.1111/tran.12185. 

Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analysing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research. 
1st ed. Routledge. 

Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. 2007. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and 
Maintenance.” Theory, Culture & Society 24(3):1–25. doi: 
10.1177/0263276407075954. 

Greer, Chris, and Eugene McLaughlin. 2010. “We Predict a Riot?: Public Order Policing, 
New Media Environments and the Rise of the Citizen Journalist.” The British 
Journal of Criminology 50(6):1041–59.  

Machin, David, and Andrea Mayr. 2012. How to Do Critical Discourse Analysis: A 
Multimodal Introduction. 1st edition. Los Angeles: SAGE Publications Ltd. 

Scheff, Thomas J. 2003. “Shame in Self and Society.” Symbolic Interaction 26(2):239–
62.  

TRIP. 2019. Louisiana Transportation by the Numbers: Meeting the State’s Need for 
Safe, Smooth, and Efficient Mobility. Washington, DC. 

 

https://doi.org/10.1111/tran.12185
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276407075954