How do the affordances of INSTAGRAM affect the way that photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?
I thought that a good way to kick off my summer subject blog posts would be to just go through my initial thoughts and reactions to this prompt, which is going to be the focal point of the course.
The first thing that comes to mind when reading the prompt is how the format of instagram impacts user content. It was initially built as a basic photo sharing app that is specifically tailored to and intended to be used on smartphones. On a surface level, these constraints have obviously had a massive impact on the design of the UI. The way the feed scrolls is intuitive to a touch screen, but would be difficult on an older phone, the picture size format is perfectly scaled to a phone screen but looks small / odd on a computer screen etc etc. But going beyond that, the app functionality also aims to keep users interested / endlessly scrolling on the app. The feed is basically never ending on instagram, which is a trend on most social media related apps, in an attempt to keep the user “in-house”, so to speak, for as long as possible, rather than just using instagram for a limited time and then closing the app. It also tailors its notifications to keep the user checking instagram whenever they post a photo by sending a push notification to the users screen every time their photo receives a like or comment.
However if we look deeper, the layout and functionality of instagram has also affected how content creators format their media content. For example, it was originally used purely to share photos of your friends / family but has now become an app littered with “influencers” that use instagram to share sponsored photos with their fans in order to reach massive audiences. There is also the growing trend of “buzz feed esque” videos. These small fluff pieces are all over instagram and have a very specific format to keep people interested. Instagram has a default setting which mutes audio on the app unless otherwise told to play sound, and so content creators have started to make videos that require no sound to keep watchers interested (big, constant subtitles across the video, little to no sound mixing and instead focusing on visual content etc). This is a great example, in my mind, of the functionality of an app forcing media professionals to create content in a certain way, which might grab more viewers but certainly limits creativity within the video format.