Call me your stock standard millennial but I love social media. I love that I can talk to my friends in London instantly on WhatsApp, I love that I can stalk my favourite celebs on Instagram, I love that can I keep extended family at a distance yet still remain connected on Facebook, I love that I can have a laugh on TikTok until the wee hours of the morning.

Exhibit A:

Does this make me a pawn in the world of Web 2.0?

This weeks reading further examined how Web 1.0 became Web 2.0 and how we as users were major instigators of this change…but was it in our favour?

“The term ‘user’ has two connotations: controller and controlled.” (pp.21)

The rise of Web 2.0 and user-generated content created a complex relationship between the users and the organisations who intended to commercialise on their online activities.  With the technical barriers for creation removed (cya, Web 1.0), more and more content was put online creating higher user engagement making it easier for marketers to gain insight for their demographics and therefore, finding ways to make some serious $$$.

A question posed from the reading: is this empowerment or exploitation?

I think it can be both. It means that once upon a time only certain powerful people had control and a voice over the majority but now the majority have a voice and control of what they want to see or hear online.  It’s empowering for the millions of users who can have all the answers they need from one search on Google, and for all the Tumblr blogs who have a platform to share their voice in any form they want and even for the Twitter enthusiast who can start a political movement and have it go viral through trending tags.

But of course it comes at a cost. Our online movements are constantly monitored and our data shared to the highest bidder as a means to find new ways to make capital, but as I mentioned in my first blog, we know this. I know this because when I scroll through stories on Instagram there is a sponsored post every so often based on things I’ve looked up previously and I know this because my YouTube recommended page is entirely made up of videos that are monetised and that are relevant to my previous watching habits.  Each of us have a profile of our online habits, a traceable map of sorts, that we don’t have access to – but someone on the other side of the planet or perhaps even next-door to you does. Creepy.

Another down fall could be our addiction to our socials. There isn’t many places I go without my phone, I’ll be honest. I mean, just take a look at my stats above…a whopping 19 hours and 53 minutes on social media alone this week.

Although, I would like to note that it has officially been one week into COVID-19 lockdown so feel free to cut me a little slack.

 

Hinton, S & Hjorth L 2013, Understanding Social Media. Sage Publications, London 2013. (pp. 1-31).

 

There were a few major things I took away from this week that I think relate to the course prompt:

1. In 2016, the UN declared access to the internet to be a basic human right and integral to allowing individuals to “exercise their right to freedom of opinion and expression”. (For which I am eternally grateful right now considering the globe has officially been put on house arrest)

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I’m having a bit of déjà vu…

 

3. The internet and the Web are not the same thing.

The internet is a global network comprised of billions of computers around the world and the Web is a collection of information accessed via the Internet. Important to note that you can have the Internet without the Web but you CANNOT have the Web without the internet. I liked how these guys described it: the Internet can be viewed as a big book-store while the Web can be viewed as collection of books in that store.

Oh but wait, there’s more…

 

4. Once there was Web 1.0 and now we have Web 2.0

Web 1.0 was the early stages of the web where users had to be highly skilled and know things like coding and have knowledge of hosting and servers just to be able to to share content online. Nowadays on Web 2.0, software is designed to be easy to use and provides everyday people the ability to use the Web as a tool for sharing and creating online content. There are now plenty of websites and software available that make it easy to build your own website, or share an image or a video such as Youtube, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc and these websites then encourage users to contribute their own content.

Extending on all of the above, our reading this week, New Media: A Critical Introduction, introduced the term User- Generated Content (UCG). UCG is defined as any type of content that has been created and posted onto an online platform – it can refer to images, videos, texts, audio files, and everything in between and is the act of users promoting a brand rather than the brand itself.

Ah, why does that sound so familiar…

.

 

Oh, that’s why. Every instagram influencer is a by-product of UCG.

 

Lister, M et al 2009, New Media: A Critical Introduction. Routledge, 2009. (Sections: Networks, Users and Economics pp 163-169; Wiki Worlds and Web 2.0 pp 204-209; The Long Tail pp 197-200; User-generated content, we are all users now pp 221-232.)

Our reading for this week, The Design of Everyday Things by Donald Norman, has focused around the affordances and constraints of everyday objects. Affordances being “perceived and actual properties of the thing, primarily those fundamental properties that determine how the thing could possibly be used,” (pp. 9) and constraints being those which limits the amount of ways an object can be used.

Norman suggests that a good design will have a rich set of affordances for the user and that constraints can be categorised into four; physical, semantic, cultural and logical.

Physical
Physical limitations of an object that might limit possible actions

Semantic
The meaning within the situation and rely on a user’s prior knowledge of the situation and the world

Cultural
The cultural conventions that might influence the situation

Logical
Logical possibilities of an object

So what does this have to do with Instagram?

Instagram launched in 2010 and was marketed to its users as a simple video and photo-sharing social networking service , fast forward to 2020 and Instagram has become one of the biggest marketing platforms available. Going from an app that had no revenue to show for it to an estimated worth of over $100 billion.

What constraints has Instagram adapted over the past decade to ensure this (pardon the pun) rich set of affordances for its users?

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Two ones that spring to my mind are:

Physical – Forgetting your password 

I’ve noticed recently that it’s pretty hard to get locked out of your account. With most software these days automatically saving your password into their hard drives or using fingerprint or face recognition,  the need for remembering a password is long gone.

Semantic – Older generations with new technologies

Instagram very recently did a format update that made is a little easer for the older generations for navigate the app. They separated the private messages page from the notifications page as seen below:

Whereas previously, the heart icon was at the bottom and you would need you go through that link to find your messages which is a process that is only understood once becoming more advanced with the digital world.

With what seems like weekly updates from Instagram since its launch in 2009, the app is changing and evolving constantly to make it easier for its users to author, publish and distribute content across its network.

 

Norman, D 1998, The design of everyday things , Basic Book, New York (Sections: Preface vii-xv; Chapter one pp 1-13; Chapter 4 (constraints) pp 81-87; (computers) pp 177-186).

I used to laugh at my friend because she would put black tape over the cameras on her electronic devices.

“They’re literally watching and listening to everything we do”, she would shriek at me in self-defence, “I was talking to a friend about Ketel One last week and this week I was scrolling though Insta and three separate ads from Ketel One came up on my feed.”

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This was usually my response.

It’s a few years later now and it is common knowledge that Instagram is always watching. Maybe it’s because the thought of it is so creepy that most of us choose to turn a blind eye to it. You know what they say, ignorance is bliss – but to be honest, I really hadn’t thought about the why or how until I read the required reading, Software Literacy, for class this week.

The reading was insightful to point out the significance of software, in our current society, in order to help us understand the influence that this kind of technology has in every aspect of our daily lives.

“There is an increasing imperative to consider the nature of user performance of software because so much of contemporary media and other practices entail software performances in real-time, creating experiences that only exist at the product of interaction….most software have a genealogy we can trace, to consider the assumptions about users, and about specific practices, which are coded into the possible actions it enables and constrains.” (p.7)

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 Right, so that briefly covers the how…but the why?

A sponsored post come through on my Insta stories a few weeks back for Alison Jade Brows and I went through the motions when something catches your eye: click profile, scroll photos, search website, find services and I distinctly remember reading the prices for a standard brow shape (which normally costs around $30) at $70 and thinking, ‘IN WHAT WORLD WOULD I PAY THAT’, and promptly exited and returned to my feed.

But alas, the software had already processed that I’d shown some interest and everyday after that a sponsored Alison Jade ad would show up somewhere throughout the app.

I’m ashamed to admit that eventually I caved.

I booked the appointment.

I paid the $70.

My brows didn’t look any different than if I had gone to my usual place.

But was that not the intent? Had the software not done exactly what Instagram required of it? Has Insta not become one of the worlds biggest marketing platforms and how does this affect the way in which content is  created and published?