Since photography’s inception we have seen a shift of its means; beginning purely as a form of documentation, to art, to a blend of the two in mass utilization of social media. This is explored in Kamila Kuc’s and Joanna Zylinska’s ‘Photomeditations: a reader’ heavily, beginning with an apt quote from Susan Sontag; ‘To live is to be photographed, to have a record of one’s life, and therefore to go on with one’s life oblivious, or claiming to be oblivious, to the camera’s nonstop attentions’ (Sontag, 2004), thus ‘turning every photograph on the Web into a potential frame in a boundless film’

Subsequently it is from this in which we observe the transformation of the affordances of photography; no longer to merely capture an event, but now more to allow for a greater ability to reflect on self.  In being able to so easily photograph and capture every waking moment we are able to create a condensed time-lapse of one’s life, and with that, comes the chance to track, compare, and meditate; hence the term ‘photomeditation’.

This majorly contributes as to why Instagram has become a world heavyweight in competing social medias; it skips over a reliance on text and plays to the newfound affordances with photography, and has helped further develop and expand on them today.