Megan Halpern’s and Lee Humphreys’ newly coined term ‘Iphoneography’ has heavily implications  within its name itself, and has made me want to look into it deeper this week and discuss its values.
Essentially coming down to describe the form of photographic styles and affordances with camera-phones, iphoneography has become the leading contributor to Instagram’s success; further developing of new affordances with photography and the use of photography today, no longer purely as documentation, but tracking, comparison, and self-reflection

The camera has become the cornerstone of marketing any major phone due to the public’s growing and dominant reliance on photography in modern social media as well as our relationship with photography itself.

We now have the chance to photograph what we want, when we want, with nearly unlimited amounts of potential in photo-manipulation in our very hands, and able to do so within minutes. Not only is this a chance to document facts and events, but allows the user to alter ‘truth’, to represent themselves in a way previously unable. It due to this reason that social media, particularly image based ones such as Instagram have become so dominant in our everyday lives. In every chance to project yourself comes a chance to self-reflect.
Instagram’s choice of filter is not presented an as option you have to seek, it is presented as a mandatory step: you have to change and edit what you are about to publish to the world; be what you want and be seen how you want to be seen. Why seek betterment or other means of happiness when you can pose and apply a filter to look happier and better? It is in this we have false documentation and misleading truths. To those around you is there a difference in you being happy and looking happy? We so easily take this for face value that we often reject the chanced to dig deeper. To look back on someone’s Instagram and see a happy photo of them years ago now becomes irrefutable fact and evidence of their condition.  It is easier to be remembered as happy with a mere simple pose than it is to actually converse and prove it, hence why Instagram’s ‘image-first, text later’ formula has been so successful.

It is difficult to see how Instagram will further progress when it has seemingly already perfected the art of deception; it’s not used to manipulate photos, but reality and representations of people.