The present study aims to reveal how digitalised consumption culture is reconfigured within the context of Instagram through a bibliometric analysis approach. The transformation of consumption from a purely economic exchange into a multifaceted communicative practice interwoven with display, self-presentation, visibility, labour, and political expression has produced a rapidly expanding yet thematically fragmented body of literature. Accordingly, the research seeks to comprehensively map the conceptual intensities, interdisciplinary positioning, temporal evolution, and intellectual collaboration networks that characterise academic work on the Instagram–consumption nexus. The dataset of the study consists of 1,170 academic publications indexed in the Scopus database. Using VOSviewer, the analysis includes keyword co-occurrence networks, density maps, author and country collaboration networks, and journal clusters. The findings indicate that the core of the literature is shaped by a marketing-oriented paradigm organized around trust, purchase intention, and consumer behaviour. However, an expanding body of critical communication and cultural studies has emerged, centring on themes such as conspicuous consumption, authenticity, activism, youth, and gender. Temporal analyses demonstrate that earlier discussions centred on status display and selfie-related themes. In contrast, recent years have seen a shift towards sustainability, ethical consumption, TikTok, cross-platform fluidity, and digital activism, reflecting more normative and political orientations. The analysis of country and journal networks demonstrates that the field has evolved into an interdisciplinary and multi-polar structure, with Türkiye emerging as one of the actors positioned close to the centre of this network. Overall, this comprehensive mapping not only documents the current state of Instagram-based consumption research but also proposes new future research agendas on rising topics such as surveillance capitalism, algorithmic governance, and AI-mediated consumption practices.