CRITICAL LITERACY ANALYSIS OF POWER REPRESENTATION IN FOLKATIVE’S INSTAGRAM HEADLINES AND CAPTIONS

Abstract

Social media platforms such as Instagram have transformed the way information is consumed, blending news, culture, entertainment, and personal content within multimodal environments. This study examines how power is represented in social media texts using Janks’ Critical Literacy Framework, particularly its power dimension. The study focuses on Folkative (@folkative), an Indonesian Instagram account covering creative culture, lifestyle, and social issues. Using a qualitative descriptive approach, the study analyzed the headlines and captions of the ten most-liked posts published in August 2026, selected from 113 posts. The analysis was operationalized through three categories: emphasis, positioning, and representation. The findings showed that power was represented through the foregrounding of particular people, events, experiences, and issues, the positioning of readers toward particular perspectives, and the representation of people and issues in specific ways. Headlines primarily established the focus of each post, while captions either provided additional contextual information or reinforced the topic through emotional expressions. The findings demonstrate how examining power in social media texts can contribute to critical literacy by encouraging readers to recognize how textual choices make particular perspectives more visible and shape the interpretation of social media content.