How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This week I was running out of things to take videos of because doors are pretty much only attached to things that are stationary. So I thought it was time I sat down and had a long think about how to think outside the box. At first I was trying to find a doorway that we pass so often that we forget about it. For example, do you know the feeling of locking your car so often that it becomes second nature, and then just as you’re falling asleep your eyes snap open and you think, ‘did I lock the car?’. The obvious one is the front door but mine isn’t very interesting and I’m trying really hard to find more aesthetically pleasing doorways. So then I thought about the Chinatown threshold, that’s a door right? It is definitely a doorway, a threshold to step across to welcome you into another space? Anyway, I was on my way to hunt down the Chinatown door and an ambulance raced past me, and that’s when I realised that it could be interesting to record the exact opposite of what I was originally thinking. A door that we pass so infrequently that we hardly ever think about it, and if we do, unfortunately, have to pass through it, there is often so much else going on that thinking about the doorway is definitely not the priority.
I captured this video near the hospitals at St Vincent’s Plaza, and it was very spontaneous, after all that was the intention of the founders, as Systrom is quoted in Manovich (2016, p.12) ‘Instagram is about producing photos on the go, in the real world, in real-time.’ And of course, as the Ambulance went past my video app on my iPhone SE, wouldn’t open and it was a race against the clock. But in the nick of time it decided to cooperate, and I captured the somewhat, unstable footage. I then uploaded the video from my camera roll to Instagram and then clipped it to a shorter length and applied the ‘Lark’ filter because I think it will allow the video to easily blend into the other tones in my feed. I also shot the video in portrait orientation so moved it up higher in the Instagram editor to show more sky and less road.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
During the authoring stage, I added a City of Melbourne geotag so that when I published the image it would be automatically distributed and available to any Instagram user searching through that geotag. I created a short and long caption, the short caption was published at the time and the longer caption, along with hashtags was published post-authoring. The short caption was simply, ‘ A set of doors on wheels’, outlining the connection to the ‘doors’ prompt. The second, longer caption was a description of how I actually came to the idea of tracking down a set of doors we never notice. In the last 22 hours, the video has had 7 views, which is actually doing better than the last video I posted which has only collected 9 views in an entire week. My most popular photo so far is this week’s photograph of the Fitzroy doorway (see my last post), which has had 13 likes.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
Distributing this video to Tumblr and Twitter actually proved more difficult than my previous posts. Instagram posted the video to my Tumblr, but it redirected to Instagram and then nothing would load so I’m not sure if it was just me, or something else was going on. Because of this, I needed to open the Tumblr app and try and distribute without Instagram. Except this time, I was asked to choose a 3 second clip from my video to convert into a GIF, I chose the point where the ambulance crosses the sunset. I added a slightly altered set of hashtags, including #sunset, #ambulance, #driving, #melbourne, #australia and #sick, as well as changing the caption to ‘Driving off into the sunset’ because I thought I should experiment with a completely different caption and see what happens. You can find the post here.
I don’t really like the way Tumblr forced my video to be turned into a GIF, because it added quality and time constraints. However, I remember when I used to use Tumblr frequently and videos would never load, they had a serious problem with videos, so perhaps this has been their way of trying to fix this problem. Furthermore, I wasn’t happy with the way my automatic post to Twitter was just a link to my Instagram account, and even when I clicked through the link on the automatically generated tweet it took me to a ‘Page not found’ notification. So I deleted the tweet and reposted with the actual video, and caption without hashtags. Needless to say, the auto-distribution of this week’s video did not go to plan and ended up being quite frustrating and time consuming. This undermines the exact reason for the inclusion of the automatic distribution feature, that being to make the distribution process more quick and simple.
My realisation of algorithmic power:
This week, after reading Manovich’s throughts on the disproportionate engagement (Manovich, 2011, p.26) on Instagram and reflecting on my own engagement, it made me realise that the algorithm in itself is an affordance or constraint depending on who you are and your engegment levels. And I did some research on it through sites like this.
We dont actually know how the algorithm works, but at this point we know it has to do with engagment levels and distributing user content depending on what people are going to like, which is often dependent on what other users are engaging with. Thus, it comes full circle and reinforces users, or posts, with high engagement, but also reinforces the low engagement rates of other users who the algorithm will not favour.
So even when it looks as though Instagram allows users to distribute our content across the world, the algorithm is actually determining whether or not it reaches those followers. And even if you use hashtags, whether or not your post performs well will be determined by the algorithm. The more I was thinking abou this, the more I realised that the algorithm is probably stopping me from seeing, and being inspired by, a majority of the content on Instagram.
References:
Manovich, L 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image, University of San Diego, USA. (pp. 24-52)