“How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?”

I actually cannot describe to you my relief when I saw that this was the prompt that would shape the Networked Media course.

Whilst I know that Instagram is merely the diving board which we will use to plunge into a broader discussion of how online networks function, it was comforting to see something which I am so familiar with, in a course which I am otherwise not that familiar with at all.

I spend an embarrassing amount of time on Instagram. It is not even that I love it or even post that regularly, it is just out of habit. When I wake up in the morning, I check Instagram. When I am on the train to Uni, I spend the majority of that time checking Instagram. Bored in a lecture? Check Instagram. 

And the reason I keep checking? Well, as Niederer (2018, p. 6) said, we really do live in an ‘age of visual abundance.’ Every single time I go on Instagram (how many more times do you think I can say ‘Instagram’ by the way), there are new images to see, like and share. In this week’s reading, Niederer (2018, p. 13) states that ‘Instagram users upload 95 million photos per day.’ While this number may have shocked me slightly at first, when I actually think about it, I am not that surprised at all.

But these photos are not merely being posted online and that is the end of it.

I remember when was probably about 13 years old and Instagram was just starting to really take off. Being a young and somewhat naïve Year Eight student, I truly did believe that the more followers you had, or the more likes your photos got, the cooler you were.

Then one day, we discovered the hidden trick!

Simply by adding hashtags into the description of my photos, such as #fun #summer #friends #cool (lame, I know), I would suddenly get 500+ likes within minutes. Were they all fake accounts? Most likely. Did I care? No.

 

But, I also did not realise the gravity of what this meant.

By putting these hashtags onto my photos, Instagram was then able to share and filter them into other people’s feeds, opening the photos up to a much larger network than just the people who followed me.

Now, I work for a small business who does not invest any money in traditional advertising, but rather uses Instagram as their main marketing platform.

Having access to a business Instagram is extremely interesting as it allows you to view the insights on each of your posts (i.e. how many people it reached, how many people sent it to their friends and how many people saved it to their own Instagram) as well as the overall engagement of your account. This information then allows us as a business to learn what our followers engage best with, and thus we can alter our future posts to align with this.

 

Whilst I began this course with a sense of trepidation, I am now excited to gain an even better understanding of one of my favourite apps.

Reference list:

Niederer, S 2018, Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam, pp 1-20.