List of things you take before leaving the house (in China during coronavirus outbreak)
Experiment 1 – PRACTICAL LIST
NoWorries
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Assignment 3 – REPORT
Name: Tongyu YIN (s3763200)
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
Blog reflections
Authoring_Week9_”Instagram Image”
Authoring_Week9_”Instagram Video”
Publishing_Week10_”Instagram Photo”
Publishing_Week10_”Instagram Video”
Distributing_Week11_”Instagram Photo”
Distributing_Week11_”Instagram Video”
Prompt: How do the affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?
Word count: 1165 (without in-text reference)
Title of report:
Educated by Instagram From Within
Introduction:
This report mainly discussed the educative aspect of Instagram that had influenced people’s way of thinking, hence affect the authoring, publishing and distributing of works in the network indirectly. By explaining the inspiration taken from various academic resources and drawing up the personal experience during practice related to the topic, this report evaluates the reasons, presences and limitations of Instagram’s influence on people’s thinking mode.
Background:
By taking 12 weeks’ study combined with weekly posts, I would consider the course syllabus as 3 separate but interconnected parts: the basis that forms Instagram, analysing practices of others and explaining the practice of myself. The first part had given me the concept that Instagram as a platform of new media that relied on user-generated contents, Instagram keeps evolving since its first release, which copes the Web 2.0 rules to have more affordances to let the users immersed with the service it provides. Followed by these understandings, the next part of the study had let me recognize the changes that Instagram as a part of 21st-century media platform, had made to the production and distribution of visual contents under networked and analogue circumstances.
Through the practice, I got a stronger realization that users on Instagram have their own purpose and intentions to achieve on this platform. While Manovich (2017, p. 17) suggested that Instagram supports the variety of platform culture, which could also associate with another study that provides the classification of Instagram users’ motivation of using the service: ‘social interaction, archiving, self-expression, escapism, and peeking’ (Lee, E, Lee, J-A, Moon & Sung 2015). Although there are different user motives regard to social and psychological aspects, ultimately, Instagram is able to afford service that influent the users’ way of authoring, publishing and distributing into an ‘Instagram-friendly’ mode. This observation leads me to decide to consider relating Instagram’s affordance in the aspect of effecting visual content production by affecting the users’ mindset.
Evidence/What?
I decided to base the production of image and video on my existing Instagram account @nicnort0336 which had few published contents before this class to investigate the course prompt. I would like to see the continuous posting have effects on me and my followers that mainly formed by my acquaintances, to further understand the Instagram affordances.
By considering the way to engage the course prompt to my blog posts in Meidafactory.org, I had divided the posts’ focus on authoring, publishing and distributing separately along the past three weeks. Other than the self-study based on practices of producing photo and video, the in-class discussion, the readings provided by the course syllabus and extra researching on academic journals also helped me examine the prompt.
Along with these feeds of information from various source and take into the practice of authoring, publishing and distributing visual media, one of the major findings related to the prompt is the ‘coherence and logical simplicity’ (Manovich 2017) of Instagram which makes the different functions coalesce into an integrated piece with strong affordance. Instagram, as a platform focused on making user communities sharing the user-generated contents, had put great efforts on minimizing operation in the publishing and distributing process. The most encouraged and frequently-used functions require few clicks to achieve, while the user interface design incentivizes users to browse and have interaction with others as well.
For example, I was neither familiar with Instagram nor interested in using it at the beginning of the course, it still provides great accessibility to me by its intuitive user-interface, encouraged me to stick with its service. What Instagram had changed on me is that it gradually taught me to use more of its features: I started using hashtags on week 10, and this publishing action using Instagram’s way was encouraged by the platform, it attracts more followers and likes to my posts. I started to think if following Instagram’s guidance of publishing can give me more likes and followers, I might follow this way of publishing on Instagram to keep promoting myself since the growing sense of being interested does fulfil vanity and satisfy the self-cognition. At this point, I put more time in and beyond the publish state, I author a photo with a lot of editing to make it have an acceptable quality, publish the photo with hashtags, mentions and interesting captions as an approach to gain more attention from the platform, distribute on other platforms with link that directly to the original Instagram post’s page. Instagram’s encouragement of users’ self-expression in public (Berry 2018, p. 33) has connected people through platforms.
Evaluation:
Instagram educates people with its affordance, hence the visual contents that people create would tend to follow the ‘Instagram framework’ no matter if they are inside or outside the platform.
The building up of the ‘Instagram ecosphere’ could be divided into three circulative-able steps: attracting users, encourage users and harvesting the user-generated contents which not only consolidate the existing users’ viscosity but also gain the power of promoting the platform, with more popularity of the platform, this procedure goes back to attracting users.
By referring to the increased 9 million monthly active users Instagram gained in the past five years (Statista 2018), the growing acceptance of this platform among the people became noticeable. Suggested by Fang and Neufeld (cited in Zolkepli, Hasno & Syed Mukhi ar 2015), the virtual communities are strongly depended on the participants’ consistent efforts on participation, indicates the continuous consumption on Instagram provided media reflects the fulfilled individual needs of users. This fulfilment has quantified by the number of followers, likes, comments that Instagram provided as functions to communicate, give the users an intuitive way of knowing their performance quality of being accepted by the Instagram-educated community. According to Manovich (2017, p.118), this presence of users being instructed is the choice of social media tribes to emerge and sustain themselves, base on the formed aesthetic experience and adoption. Where based on the platform’s solid foundation of the user group, Instagram ‘taught’ its users how to author, publish and distribute their works. Other platforms that are able to distribute Instagram contents also shared some common features with Instagram due to the Web 2.0-based platform’s feature, hence people would tend to bring their behaviour trained in Instagram outside to other platforms as well.
As a result, I would consider that the advantages of visual contents’ production cycle in nowadays affected by Instagram’s growing affordances are irreversible since it ‘become associated with specific ways of thinking’ (Khoo, Hight, Torrens, Cowie 2017, p. 5). These affordances changed users’ habits during the process of providing services. However, this educative property of Instagram is limited by this affordance as well. It catered to the users to change their way of producing visual contents, emphasised the individualities of users hence their purposes of using Instagram were not affected to a large extent, this reflects especially by the work’s authoring process.
Conclusion:
Instagram, as a new media platform with evolving affordance, its capability of attracting various user communities with wide-spread interests and user behaviours can be considered as what empowered it to have influences on its users’ way of thinking. I would consider this report lacks the balance between supporting references and appropriate expression of critical thinking, further improvements would need more research and better writing skills.
References:
Berry, T. B 2018, Videoblogging Before YouTube, Institute of Network Cultures, viewed 14 March 2018, pp. 8-33.
Khoo E, Hight C, Torrens R, Cowie B 2017, ‘Introduction: Software and other Literacies’ in Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, Springer, Singapore.
Lee, E, Lee, J-A, Moon, JH & Sung, Y 2015, ‘Pictures Speak Louder than Words: Motivations for Using Instagram’, CyberPsychology, Behavior & Social Networking, vol. 18, no. 9, pp. 552–556, viewed 31 May 2019, <http://search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/login.aspx?direct=true&db=bth&AN=109323842&site=ehost-live>.
Manovich, L 2017, Instagram and contemporary image, California Institute for
Telecommunication and Information & The Graduate Center, City University of New York (CUNY), Cultural Analytics Lab
Statista 2018, Number of monthly active Instagram users from January 2013 to June 2018 (in millions), Statista, viewed 30 May 2019, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/>
Zolkepli, I.A., Hasno, H. & Syed Mukhiar, S.N. 2015. Online Social Network Citizen Engagement on Instagram Crowdsourcing: A Conceptual Framework. Electronic Journal of Knowledge Management, 13(4)
Distributing_Week11_”Instagram Video”
How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This video was recorded on Sunday afternoon at Footscray Coles, using my smartphone VIVO NEX S’s rear camera (like in previous posts). In VIVO’s default camera app there is a time-lapse option which allows me to take real-time time-lapse videos without any further editing, I recorded under this function and applied filter called ‘Vivacity’ in the ‘Trim’ option of the phone’s default gallery app, which lightened the colours of the overall video, also I would consider that brighter graphic fit the fast-paced motion of the crowd better.
While I was scrolling down my previous Instagram posts, and finally decided to take this video clip as the last weekly post, I realized my ‘pattern’ of the published things, beyond what I mentioned in the last post on distributing Instagram photos which is about ‘building up online characteristic’, I found out that my authoring, publishing and distributing are all strongly related to my connections: friends, families, lovers. I enjoyed the discussions and chat about our recent published things on Instagram, bring our online activities’ impacts to offline. Hence, I author the things that related to my life, networking with my connections; I publish the things that my acquaintances would found it funnier with our shared knowledge and experiences; I distribute to where my friends and families are (since they allocated on different platforms).
Therefore, in this one I choose to record people going through the open-and-close glass door of Coles, trying to imply that ‘it is the people(users) who brings the platform prosperity’ by emphasising this motion of the crowd in this video. People are networked with each other, so do the people and Instagram.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The more Instagram post I made, the more familiar I get with its way of working. This video was mostly done in the authoring stage hence the publish didn’t stress me too much. The Instagram application was built to reduce the effort you put in this publishing stage, I can find the freshly edited video from the top of the gallery, select it, describe what I thought about the video in a straightforward way, mention my boyfriend (he is also the author of the port Arthur photo in week 10) for thanking him supporting me during the ‘on-site’ filming, and use hashtag at last to have some elements that people in Instagram might look into and see my post.
I was not quite interested in using the hashtag from the beginning to now, I can study its features and advantages, knowing that is developed for people who want to be promoted to the public. However, there ARE users like me on Instagram, I’m not aiming to promote myself online (for now), what I valued most is my offline lives, hence the Instagram’s most bold affordance to me is its power to imperceptibly connect online and offline, having effects on people beyond the platform.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
Once the ‘share on other platforms’ button of Instagram is turned on, it is always on. Unlike WeChat Moments which is detached from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr are interconnected with Instagram, especially Facebook who is the owner of Instagram services. Other than these three platforms which have the easiest and quickest portal for users to share with, there are also other online communities with other specialities like WeChat Moments (mostly used by Chinese). Considering my situation, I went shared with Facebook, Tumblr and WeChat Moments.
(no idea why the Tumblr one did not show the thumbnail)
Distributing_Week11_”Instagram Photo”
How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
This photo was taken during my Easter vacation, I was in Adelaide, walking back to the hotel with a lot of vegetables and fruits bought, at 8 pm. Along the road, I saw this front gate of a building with a very different design style with other Adelaide buildings: glass, transparent, bright. I just personally like this door and took a photo of it with my VIVO NEX S using the front camera like what I did in other posts. It is a random click like the hashtag described, I had no intention of taking this photo in a very serious way. However for this picture particularly, I didn’t use the original camera application of VIVO NEX, I chose Camera P3 designed by Google, which has had grafted to basically every Android operating system, and have that speciality of ‘night vision’ that can make photos took in dim light looks better.
Well, since I made up my mind of using this picture as the one to post on Instagram and as a part of my weekly blog post, I did the editing in a long time after the photo was taken. One of the major discovery is that the original picture (the second image attached to this Instagram post) does not hold a satisfying quality, and I opened Snapseed to edit it.
First I used the ‘perspective’ tool in Snapseed, which allows me to adjust the angle of the picture, make it aligned in a more horizontal, ‘structured’ way. This perspective adjusting is one of my major editing habits, it makes the photo looked more managed and well-cared. After that, I applied my loved ‘socialism-cyberpunk’ filter like in week 10’s post, and it is quickly done with a nice look.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
Like mentioned before, this photo was a random click, it is single-copied in my phone’s photo storage, and since I was satisfied with my edit I saved that edited version just once as well, there are not many struggles in the process of picking the photo — I did the selecting in the authoring part since it is not a recently taken photo.
However, talking about the photo selecting: through 3 weeks’ image and video posted on Instagram, I am aware that I had some ‘online characteristic’ built up — a family oriented, travel lover. This online identity builds up during the posts, and finally, become a factor that affected my decisions on the content I picked for posting on Instagram. Which also caused me to add the location of Adelaide (to show that I was travelling) during upload.
I was unable to know what purpose of the door actually have, hence I named it with the captions saying its street number (which is very bold in the photo as well), ‘Glass door 95’
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
By movingthis week’s post, I would like to talk about something about my personal ‘distributing strategy’ and some in-detailed thoughts of Instagram post’s online-offline interaction as an extension of these discoveries in my week 10 post.
I have various names on different platforms, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and WeChat. I didn’t choose to change the names or just start new accounts on these platforms just for this course’s assignment, I kept going with my old accounts and posting all my works on them. Some of my acquaintances had reached to me and ask “Hey Nico what do all the door posts mean? Why are you suddenly a big fan of doors.” And I was glad they asked, showing their attention paid to my contents provided on my distributing accounts.
to
Publishing_Week10_”Instagram Video”
How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The original picture for making this video was taken at my apartment’s parking lot elevator door. there were two versions of it, one is this steady picture, the other is an actual video, showing the elevator door opening. The reason I took this picture and made it become some kind of video is that I am running out of creativities on door portrait, while still wanted to keep something different and special. I thoughted about the boundaries that made video and image different but related media(especially for those posted on Instagram), and came up with this thought. The device used is still my own phone VIVO NEX S, same as most of the previous posts.
The elevator door of the parking lot was chosen to be pictured is because I remembered when I first get into that elevator, the firmness of the whole elevator’s texture truly impressed me. Me, personally as an industrial-style lover, liked this door, and thoughted that this is the time to show it on my Instagram page. 
I ran downstairs, took the photo in several different angles with opened and closed elevator door, and after that, I went back home to had a look of all the pictures, then select one of them to edit in the Snapseed app(developed by Google LLC). For this type of picture’s specific aura I had a preset created by myself named ‘社博朋克’ (see screenshot at right side, it means ‘socialism cyberpunk’, which is inspired by some Chinese science fictions). I applied this filter to the original picture and saved it as a first draft. After the first draft, this seems not satisfied to me, the contrast and the brightness level was not strong enough — hence I used the feature in Snapseed called ‘selective’, which allowed me to adjust brightness, contrast, structure intensity and saturation in a selected area. I made the inside of the doors brighter while darkening the surroundings, and added a little touch of stronger saturation at the right side of the photo (where the orange-red-ish colouring lies). Finally, the photo was finished its editing process, I saved it’s final look and move to the step of make it a small video clip — the next software I reached is ‘Glitch!’ by Luca Grillo, I overlayed both VHS and Glitch effects, then used the S-capture feature of my VIVO NEX S to record the screen: I kept changing the effects in ‘Glitch!’ to make the photo have a moving effects, and the recorded video was saved to my phone’s internal storage automatically.
Well, If you don’t want to use the effect and the filters that everyone seems using on Instagram, to have something different, it surely needs some editing outside the platform.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The Glitch! effect was indeed cool, however, the first thing I discovered after actually seeing the post finished and popped up on my Instagram, is that the elevator door is not that clear to be recognized as a door under these moving effects, at least not very clear. I wanted the publish be clear not only for my assignment submission to be legit but also for not making my 20 followers confused — it’s not much, but since most of them are friends and acquaintance I value them — which leads me to post another Instagram post that can be considered as a support material of this video:
Which showing the raw photo took and the edited final look.
These uploads are done in several clicks within the Instagram app, the captions as well are not the part I put many efforts on. For the video, what I did is made the voice prompts of the elevator become more ‘glitchy’ and present them in words, like little seizures in the sound.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
For this one, the main distribution was still based on my Facebook page like it always was, the ‘share on Facebook’ button is automatically turned on:
And other than that, I just found one of the great places to share the random posts and pictures while I am still able to say that these posts are representing me, my tastes and standards of making photos and video clips — at the ‘moments’ in WeChat:
It is also the platform for users to share images, texts and videos to express their own thoughts and creations, and it is the type of community that I would like to share things on because WeChat is a social-communication-based platform, in where I know who my followers are and I am happy to show them my works.
Publishing_Week10_”Instagram Photo”
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.
Authoring_Week9_”Instagram Video”
How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
The device used and the location of this video were the same with my another post, but was taken in the horizontal direction. In the background, I was talking to my landlord to help me opening and closing the door (in Chinese), it’s not only because we are both from China, but also that would make more sense where the words written on red paper that sticks on the door are in Chinese as well. I did not do any editing on this video since the original one fits Instagram’s restricted size well, which is lucky it did not annoy me a lot like it always does before.
I suddenly realized how important is it to always shoot the main object in the centre (for a video or image that was planned to post on Instagram). It is kind of ‘educational’, or say interesting if you think about it — Instagram is teaching me, a user, about how to fit in and adapt to its rules.
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
First, to show the thankfulness to my landlord (@sunnytcc) with her assisting in this video, I mentioned her in this post on Instagram, it is also meant to bring her some interesting things to look at. The video was plainly uploaded directly without any editing since I thought that was the best way of publishing it, showing a different vibe from the previous photo posted with strong editing stitches. While I’m writing the captions, the final touch of my post, one meme just popped up in my mind. The formatting was like “Nobody: ___________, Some particular one you want to address: __*do some uncommon thing*__”. And both of us thought that would be fun since those Mandarin letters are not quite like what a girl would put on her bedroom door.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
I’m a boring person with a limited group of social acquaintances, hence I did not have the intention to publish this video to other social media service, however, the ‘share on Facebook’ under publishing page of Instagram was automatically turned on, which leads to the distributing of this video on my linked Facebook account’s page.
…In addition, since my landlord thinks this would be so much fun to have it on WeChat Moments as well (as our shared nationality, we are both Chinese, hence naturally we use WeChat a lot), I put it on my Moments:
