Tag Archives: A1

An interesting point that was raised today in class was which apps we consider to be social media. Elaine asked the class which apps come to mind when we think about social media and all the normal staples of the industry were mentioned (Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, Facebook etc). One that wasn’t mentioned by the class however was YouTube. Now YouTube is definitely a social media app by the definition, but why is there this disconnect between the others mentioned and apps like Youtube or Spotify that definitely do have social content on them?

I think, possibly, there are two reasons that YouTube wasn’t thought of in this context by anyone in the class. First, YouTube, generally, isn’t used by many people to communicate with their friends/followers. Obviously it is used in that way by the content creators on YouTube, but the vast majority of YouTube users would view themselves as consumers, not creators. When we think of a social media app, we think of snap chatting our friends, posting to an instagram story or messaging each other on facebook. I would guess that most people don’t even comment on YouTube, and so for the vast majority of people there is 0 social interaction on youtube. So, when we have that strong, direct conversational/social perception of what a social media app does, YouTube falls into a slightly different category.

Secondly, for most people on youtube, it is passively consumed content rather than active. When people are using Instagram or Snapchat etc they are often liking photos, messaging their friends, regramming or saving content they enjoy, posting their own photos etc. YouTube however, for the vast majority of users, occupies a space much more similar to traditional broadcast TV or modern streaming platforms like Netflix. People log onto YouTube, watch the content that is produced by their favourite channels and then thats where their usage on the app ends. They don’t use YouTube to message anyone, they don’t post comments, they don’t submit their own videos etc. Even when a someone wants to share a YouTube video with their friends on social media, they use a different app to do so (messenger or twitter for example).

One of the extra resource readings for this class is an article published to online media outlet WIRED concerning the economic trend of “long tail media”, which basically describes the notion that the market for non-mainstream media content combined are bigger than the mainstream media that is consumed. The article goes on to argue that this line of thinking will shift the economy of media away from blockbusters/lowest common denominator content and into wider and more niche concepts. At a base level, it is true. Obviously, there is always going to be content filling niche’s that mainstream media isn’t going to bother to try and cash in on. Netflix has thousands of titles on its browser, for example, and they are deliberately picked to try and appeal to the widest audience possible. So while it is true that niche markets are big (and probably growing with the ever expanding content outlets online), the notion that the entire economic media landscape will shift towards that model doesn’t seem to line up with the current trend (especially in film and music) in content creation.

Currently, generic blockbuster movies are bigger than ever. Expanded universes, trilogies, prequels, sequels etc are dominating the box office. Cinema companies are, more and more, giving screens to the lowest common denominator films rather than taking chances on the more “niche” or (as they are sometimes viewed) “risky” options. I can honestly only see this trend continuing to a point where cinemas will only show blockbuster films and everything else will be only available online. And while, as the article points out, this online only form of niche distribution is rapidly growing in economic viability as a business model, its also getting harder and harder to find production companies that are willing to finance projects that aren’t tying in with some kind of established brand/actor/cinematic universe/source material. While it is true that the biggest market, inevitably, lies outside the top “X” percentage of songs streamed/movies played in cinema etc, that doesn’t mean thats where the most money is for the content creators. So while its true that Spotify makes a ton of money on the “small sales” (the top 10,000 songs get less plays than all the rest combined), it is increasingly becoming harder for bands to get their music onto Spotify if they aren’t an established brand. Similarly in film, while its true that a relatively sizeable portion of Netflix’s library that is streamed aren’t even released in cinemas, its getting harder to find backers with enough money to make those smaller movies with quality.

Today’s lecture was centred around the design concept of affordances, which was first brought into light by Don Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things. In a brief sentence, Affordances are an object’s properties (real or perceived) that indicate its possible functions to whoever is using it, which suggests how it can be interacted with.

Something that came into my mind during the presentation was the existence of non functional affordances. That is, what are the properties of an object that can indicate unintended uses without changing the literal function of the object at all. The immediate example that comes to mind is colour. The colour of an object can have real, tangible and deliberate effects on its uses. Traffic lights, for instance, only have intended functionality purely based on the colour of the three lights (red, amber, green). However, taking this further, can the colour of an object bring about unintended perceptions in the user. Imagine you were to enter a classroom where all the chairs were black except for one red chair. I would expect most people to avoid taking that chair, assuming it was red for a specific purpose. This might not actually be true, it could simply have been borrowed from another room where all the chairs were red, but just by virtue of it being superficially different, it would be perceived as having a separate function from an otherwise identical chair. This can be taken even further by simply focusing on spatial location too. Let’s say, now, that all the chairs are black. What if they were all stacked on one end of the room except one chair which is sitting on the other end of the room in front of the whiteboard by itself. It would have no added functions to the other chairs, it’s the same colour, weight, type, etc. From a design perspective, it is completely identical. I would guess that, once again, if a class was asked to grab their chairs when they entered the room, no one would go for that chair because, presumably, they would ascribe some sort of ulterior use / significance / importance to the positioning of the chair. 

When trying to apply this concept to an instagram related concept, in keeping with the course content, its hard to imagine how these unwanted and unintended aesthetic affordances could impact a content creator and even harder to conceptualise how a creator would be able to plan for this outcome. Perhaps one way is to try and avoid colour schemes that may be linked to other brands (avoid bright red and yellow so you aren’t unintentionally linked with macdonalds, for instance). But one could also argue that this could be used in a positive way, by syncing your apps/photos/content up with the colour schemes, layouts, visual aesthetics etc with famous brands, content creators could unintentionally lump themselves in with bigger brands/studios and gain a wider audience by doing so. Youtube creators are probably the biggest proponents of this strategy, where youtube video thumbnails are incredibly similar across different content creators in order to trick viewers into thinking they are watching someone they are familiar with.

How do the affordances of INSTAGRAM affect the way that photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?
I thought that a good way to kick off my summer subject blog posts would be to just go through my initial thoughts and reactions to this prompt, which is going to be the focal point of the course.

The first thing that comes to mind when reading the prompt is how the format of instagram impacts user content. It was initially built as a basic photo sharing app that is specifically tailored to and intended to be used on smartphones. On a surface level, these constraints have obviously had a massive impact on the design of the UI. The way the feed scrolls is intuitive to a touch screen, but would be difficult on an older phone, the picture size format is perfectly scaled to a phone screen but looks small / odd on a computer screen etc etc. But going beyond that, the app functionality also aims to keep users interested / endlessly scrolling on the app. The feed is basically never ending on instagram, which is a trend on most social media related apps, in an attempt to keep the user “in-house”, so to speak, for as long as possible, rather than just using instagram for a limited time and then closing the app. It also tailors its notifications to keep the user checking instagram whenever they post a photo by sending a push notification to the users screen every time their photo receives a like or comment.

However if we look deeper, the layout and functionality of instagram has also affected how content creators format their media content. For example, it was originally used purely to share photos of your friends / family but has now become an app littered with “influencers” that use instagram to share sponsored photos with their fans in order to reach massive audiences. There is also the growing trend of “buzz feed esque” videos. These small fluff pieces are all over instagram and have a very specific format to keep people interested. Instagram has a default setting which mutes audio on the app unless otherwise told to play sound, and so content creators have started to make videos that require no sound to keep watchers interested (big, constant subtitles across the video, little to no sound mixing and instead focusing on visual content etc). This is a great example, in my mind, of the functionality of an app forcing media professionals to create content in a certain way, which might grab more viewers but certainly limits creativity within the video format.