How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For this photo, I tried a different approach with its authoring: The photo used in this post was not my original record, it was taken by @zhaoxin_chang, after asked for his approval of publishing this photo under my Instagram account, we discussed how to crop the photo to make it meets the criteria of ‘door photos’ while still looks nice. The device he used was FUJIFILM X-T20, according to him, the detailed preference and setting for this photo are too blurry to be remembered since it was taken during his trip to Tasmania in last year.
In addition, although he confirmed that I could do any further refinement on this photo, I valued his originality and the natural ‘flavour’ of him to make the raw photo like that, I didn’t do any adjustments on it.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
Since the photo was already a finished piece like mentioned previously, I didn’t use any Instagram in-build photo editing tools.
For this post, I tried to use the hashtag feature of Instagram for the first time. (Yes I know, I have an old soul that resisted to keeping pace with the times living in my body) Which is quite user-friendly for a first-time user, after typed in ‘#’ and ‘Fujifilm’, the drop-down suggestion list automatically showed up with other suggested relatable hashtags (with the number of contents under that hashtag followed as well), this could really help the users who want to present their work to the public.
As for me, this try of publishing a non-original post was inspired by the Instagram post by Google in week 8, and I wanted to take in practice to see the difference between ‘publish an authored-by-myself photo’ and ‘publish a not-authored-by-myself’ work on Instagram by an individual user like me, to see the actual affordance that this platform provides to its users while encountering these different circumstances of publishing. To indicate this non-originality in the Instagram post, I wrote the caption to mention the author @zhaoxin_chang and had a brief word of promoting him. Attached the device used as well.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
To take this experiment of impacting offline through Instagram, the distribution was mainly taking place at 2 Chinese social media platforms: Weibo and WeChat Moments.
The purpose behind these actions is mainly that I would like to see my old acquaintances’ reaction to seeing these hyperlink direct to Instagram, occurred in the social media platform I haven’t use for a while.
Due to some complex problems and restrictions that can not be explained in here, there’s no legal way of accessing Instagram in China. This caused two problems of distributing: First, I have to copy and past the link to Weibo and Wechat Moments, adding the picture/screenshot of Instagram manually to share, rather than the one-click share offered by Instagram through Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr; Second, I hardly get any response or comments from my friends who are in China, while getting one Instagram private message from who is currently studying in US, which surprised me since we had lost connection for at least 3 years, and this online distribution linked us again, after that screenshot, we managed to have a reunion in next year back in China.
Now through this process of getting to know how other authors their work and having the permission of publishing the non-original authored work, brings a new understanding of Instagram contents: there is an online-offline interaction happens during the process of authoring-publishing and distributing, and these three steps do not need to follow a strictly arranged order: to publish a work does not mean this work haven’t been distributed before (the information aggregation kind of distributor/publisher can re-distribute/re-publish to spread the work in a broader range), and a work could be authored several times for different publication & distribution.
