In the reading Interrogating Popular Culture, Stacy Takacs defines popular culture as being a “culture that is widely accessible and widely accessed; widely disseminated and widely viewed or heard or read.” One of the most favourable popular cultures of today is of course Instagram. It is a huge aspect of what makes up social media today, allowing users to post photos to their page, as well as viewing their friends, acquaintances and even strangers pictures. User’s feeds will fill up with snaps including selfies accompanied by ridiculous captions, a bowl of granola someone ate for breakfast, the beach where someone took their afternoon run and basically anything else that will get people ‘likes’.

Individuals use Instagram as a way to showcase themselves to the rest of the social media world. Takacs makes a point of how this can be demonstrated through all forms of popular cultures: “They focus less on how we are duped or pacified through our consumption of cultural commodities and more on the ways we express ourselves through these commodities.” I know when I first meet someone I typically have a stalk of their Instagram, which I’m sure most would admit to being guilty of. From the inspection of someone’s Instagram I usually get a pretty good idea of what this person has an interest in, who they’re dating and what they do with their lives.

Although you can take a look at someone’s Instagram and get a general gist of who they are, you still have to ask yourself, is this really an accurate reading of who someone is? Do people use Instagram as a tool to only show their positive attributes? Do users manipulate themselves or things they do on Instagram in order to appeal to other users? Ultimately, I believe it comes down to the particular person, but more often than not, in order to ‘fit in’ we misplace our identity by using Instagram to define ourselves as something we most definitely are not.

Initially I was quite nervous to share my work with others because I felt like it was very personal and I am that kind of person who doesn’t feel comfortable putting myself out there straight away, especially with people I don’t know very well. However, quickly I grew more relaxed and stopped worrying about what people thought, because really it felt like they were interested in me and I was interested in finding out about them as well.

Through the different mediums contained in my ‘self portrait’ I tried to represent myself not in a literal form (e.g. this is my house) but by using objects and places which represent things I believe in and my personality. I found most other people represented themselves more literally showing their families, pets and bedrooms which was interesting to see the different ways in which people see themselves and how this reflects who they really are.

At first glance you do not really get the sense of who someone is; all of these things were really just files on a computer which don’t really represent anyone as they could mean anything. However, when going through the people’s blogs with them they begin explaining what the pictures mean to them and how they represent themselves; it is really these stories they begin telling where you get the true sense of who someone is and it is very interesting to see how different everyone actually is and likes to represent themselves.

I feel like it was quite difficult to give feedback on something so personal because you can’t tell someone ‘this didn’t work in your self portrait, you’re doing your life wrong’. Saying that to someone just doesn’t really make sense because people know themselves better than anyone else so their self portrait is basically just who they are and you can’t really make judgement on that, which is why I think this first assignment was not being graded.

We had three guest speakers this week for our lecture; Anne Lennox (talking about copyrighting), Kyla Brettle (lecturer at RMIT and documentary maker) and Paul Ritchard (lecturer at RMIT and filmmaker). In particular I was interested in what Paul had to say. He went through basic etiquette to have during filmmaking and some great tips for when you get your crew together, etc. In particular he mentioned a common tragedy which happens during filmmaking called serendipity. Serendipity is when something unfortunate occurs, like an actor can no longer be in your film or a location is now unavailable which means you may have had to rewrite your film or a part of it. However, even though these obstacles would normally work to your disadvantage, they can often turn out to work in your favour leaving you with a better film in the end. One of Paul’s great examples of this was a past student’s film ‘Clown Train’. Here is it:

(video source: https://youtu.be/6dX9bfCbJdw)