Trista and I picked the characteristic ‘Apps’ from the form of online media. For most people nowadays, viewing social softwares is a spontaneous behaviour that happens so frequently. So we were thinking about using this popular form, which is posting on Instagram to see how online media works in our life.

I just freely said there was a new Japanese dessert shop in QV when I discussed the project content with Trista, and she came up with the idea to shoot some photos and Insta stories of the cute desserts just like we did in our everyday life, and see the reaction of our Insta friends.

By creating the Instagram story, we found that Instagram is developing lots of new templates for users to make an interesting short video very easily. I took four photos, and chose to make a stop motion cartoon. Users can also choose to other special effects offered by Insta to create different videos. These kind of apps provide a very quick and convenient way to encourage people to create online media, because no one wants to learn to use the professional video editing programs to post their daily life. Furthermore, we found Instagram posts could be cross-platforms. When I posted the video, I could put the location mark on, and people who click on it would directly see the location through Google Map. This cooperation of apps is a useful way to provide essential information. In general, we learnt that apps can combine lots of functions to produce media, and also allow people to communication easily, which fits the fast-paced life.

However, we also think there are some limitations of social apps. People usually do not want to spend too much time watching a video on Instagram, so the best length of a video may be less than 10 seconds, and plays in a loop mode. For those longer online media projects, app is not a proper choice to show. So the platform of online media is various, and needed to be decided based on different content.