Assignment 3 – Report
Name: Laura Overgaard Sørensen s3767020

I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services

Making Media blog links
Week 9 – Instagram photo
Week 9 – Instagram video
Week 10 – Instagram photo
Week 10 – Instagram video
Week 11 – Instagram photo
Week 11 – Instagram video

This report responds directly to the course prompt:

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

Title of report: How Instagram was meant to be used vs how we actually use it

Introduction
Instagram has since its launch in 2010 become one of the most successful social medias in the world (Manovich 20116, p. 11). Instagram allows everybody with a smartphone to create their own personal portfolio of photos and videos in an aesthetic way. It was meant for quickly recording, editing and publishing a photo on the go, but today we see professional Instagrammers living of the huge amount of money they can make through Instagram. How come this has happened?
This report will try and answer the course prompt in relation to the thoughts mentioned above.

Background
Affordances is a key term when looking at how Instagram works. Affordances are what a person can physically do with a specific item. For example, you can use a book for reading, but also for scratching your back. When looking at Instagram’s affordances these become metaphorical because of the new media types such as smartphones. That means that the affordances become perceived. Here you look at what it signals you are supposed to do and how you should do it. An example could be a teapot: you could use a teapot as a pillow, but you don’t because you can read its perceived affordances. Some of the perceived affordances on Instagram are liking, following and publishing.
The term network/networked is very important in this course. Most of the time it can be translated to “online”, but there are cases where this is not a right term. This is mostly because we mix many different media types which both can be analogue and digital. Here is an example. My friend bought a disposable camera which is analogue. When she got the photos developed she got both the physically printed photos but also a digital jpeg version. She posted some of them on her Instagram. This is a good example of how different media intertwine and networks in this modern world and how Instagram is a place where photos and videos taking with other devices or in a different time come together. The funny thing about Instagram is that it affords everything you need to author, publish and distribute but it is very rare that people use it for the entire process. I have for example never taken a photo directly in the Instagram app and then published it. Instead, people use the camera app on their phone which affords taking multiple photos and easily viewing and selecting between them. Something worth noticing about social medias like Instagram is that the process of publishing and distributing seems to melt together.

Evidence/What?
In the first third of the course we investigated new media and its affordances through different theories. In the second part of the course we examined the difference between analogue and digital videos and photography by case studies of different authors. In the third part of the course we got a more active and practical by posting photos and videos to our own Instagram profiles and examining how that works.

What I have learned the last few weeks is that Instagram has many affordances and constraints when it comes to authoring, publishing and distributing videos and photos. In terms of authoring the Instagram app has a constraint to only to shoot one photo at a time, which is why most people use the camera app on their smartphone for recording the photo instead. Instagram affords different features for editing a photo such as filters, brightness, sharpness and shadowing but still there are hundreds of photo editing apps that has more features and are wildly popular. Instagram’s square photo format can also be a constraint. When it comes to videos I found that a big constraint in Instagram was that a video should be more than three seconds. Also the editing tools are very limited here, so I had to use a different app for this purpose (see this blogpost).
What I find most interesting is how the use of Instagram is different from how Instagram intended it to be. As Manovich mentions Instagram intended to create an app where you could spontaneously take a photo and share it on the go (Manovich 2016, p. 41). But this is not how it is actually used. Today influencers become wildly successful via Instagram and can make a career out of it. This takes planning and editing and this often happens though other apps than Instagram.

Evaluation
Even though Instagram has many perceived affordances such as recording and editing photos and videos these are rarely used. I would argue that a lot of what we see on Instagram does not match the affordances of Instagram. Think about how many Instagram accounts has a special theme or aesthetical attitude – an example could be @lazy that I wrote about in this blogpost (Manovich 2016, s. 76). These photos and videos are clearly authored with professional equipment and has taking a lot of planning ahead. The attitude of the account is affected by bright colours and absurd food-art. The profile is clearly used to promote the authors artwork. This to me does not how Instagram was first meant to work. This must mean that Instagram does not afford enough editing components and the recoding affordances inside the app are too poor for people to use. If Instagram improved these features maybe people would use them. On the other hand, people are now used to using other apps for editing so it could be hard for Instagram to change this behaviour amongst their users. This pattern is not only seen in professional Instagrammers but is in my experience very common with normal users – myself included. This is because there are two crucial constraints in Instagram: a) you can only take one photo at a time and b) you might want to publish a photo at another time than it is taken. It is in my opinion these two factors that causes that people do not author their photo directly in the Instagram app.

Conclusion
I can conclude that Instagram is nowadays not used entirely as the makers wanted it to be and this is cost by the affordances and constraints of Instagram’s features. Even though you can do the whole process of authoring, publishing and distributing directly in Instagram it is rarely the case. This is in my opinion due to the fact that there are better alternatives to Instagram’s in the authoring phase. Here, there are simply too many constraints for it to be the first choice for the users.
I would have liked my report to go deeper into the different features of Instagram and their affordances and constraints in relation to how people actually use Instagram. I would also have liked to be able to elaborate more thoroughly on the professional Instagrammers we see nowadays and how they use Instagram.

References

Manovich, L. 2016. “Instagram and the Contemporary Image”. University of San Diego http://manovich.net/index.php/projects/instagram-and-contemporary-image

Norman, D 1999, ‘Affordance, conventions and design (Part 2)’, Nielsen Norman Group, viewed 1 April 2012, http://www.jnd.org/dn.mss/affordance_conv.html