ABSTRACT
Technology and information are growing by leaps and bounds, and it caused a major change in the community. The appearance of Instagram as a virtual public sphere raises the question of whether Instagram can carry out the characteristic of the public sphere in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic as well as it should. This article explained how Instagram features could present the concept of the public sphere virtually through the posts of @pesonaid_travel account in this pandemic. By using qualitative descriptive methods, researcher found that there are 387 comments in 14 posts of the government’s tourism promotion official Instagram account (@pesonaid_travel) from March until May 2020. Then, the researcher filtered them into 97 comments to be used as the analysis. The findings of this research show that an Instagram account called Pesona Indonesia has the features that could be the media for the public sphere as well as it should. However, the features that could support this public sphere characteristic do not show comments that led to a significant discussion. Even though, there are some interesting discussions about tourism and pandemic. Practically, there are four characteristic comments related to tourism and the pandemic Covid-19. Those are the comment that only related to the pandemic Covid-19; the comment that only related to the intention of traveling; the comment that related to both the pandemic Covid-19 and the intention of traveling; and the other comment that is not related to the topic presented. This study is useful for presenting the concept of the better version of the virtual public sphere, especially for tourism on Instagram.
