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?