How did you author (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
For my final Instagram post, I selected a small flip book of sticky notes to video. It initially took me several tries to author the video, because I wanted the book to rifle through naturally and evenly, but I kept creating a bit of a haphazard shuffle as I flicked through the deck. I also just wanted to do it all in one take, and so avoided the multi take recording feature. As with all the videos on the page, I wanted the videos to highlight the the affordances that can be seen visually, and so I decided to turn off sound for all the uploads.
One big difference when making this image compared to using traditional film camera was the limited functionality in terms of centring/matching up lines. Originally when I sat down to film the flip book I had intended for it to be perfectly geometrically symmetrical. Instagram however has no option for a grid setting, so it was near impossible to get the lines all angled perfectly. So, out of necessity, I had settle on a more impromptu / improvised look and feel for the video. This hindrance cropped up in almost every single upload I made for this assignment. Instagram just does not have enough functionality within the app to produce really good, high quality content. This is why so many people flock to third party camera apps, which seems like a massive market inefficiency for Instagram. There are over 80 million Instagram photos shared daily (Wyzowl, 2020), and yet Instagram has invested next to nothing in their actual software when it comes to photo and video editing / capture functionality. The more time people spend on other apps, the more time they spend outside of Instagram, which is something that they have tried very hard to minimise. I think this is also why the Instagram stories is so popular, the stories are deigned to be fleeting and temporary, so the need for heavy editing / detailed videography is superfluous to the format and that allows the Instagram stories to thrive (500 million stories daily) on the platform while the traditional video uploads are severely lacking (Hutchinson, 2019).
How did you publish (the photo or video) you recorded for upload to Instagram?
Finally I managed to upload a video to Instagram without any errors or problems. I published the video directly onto my profile and did so after several failed attempts at capturing a video I thought matched the aesthetic of the account. As mentioned previously, I had to shift my focus and just capture a slightly off centred / improvised visual feel within the video. Once I settled on that format for the post, capturing the video was rather easy and I did it in one take, uploading the first video I captured after that decision. As with the other posts, no location was Geo-tagged on the post and I attached another design quote caption that reads as follows:
“Good design is honest.”
– Dieter Rams
I have been thinking, however, about another potential drawback to the app’s algorithm based spam detection that I have elaborated on in the past few posts. I cannot be the only person that has had struggles with publishing their content to Instagram, and when I had trouble uploading my videos and photos, the first attempt at a solution was repeatedly trying to re-upload it. I’m sure this would be exactly the same response that many other people would have had to their own difficulties navigating the publishing process on Instagram and, if so, were they targeted and banned as well? If constant uploads of similar content is one of the detection methods that the algorithm uses, then I can only imagine how many other people were inadvertently shadow banned from posting (like my first account was) without actually doing anything that violates Instagram terms of service. My particular problem could probably be solved temporarily by using third party apps to do all the editing and then simply uploading the finished product to Instagram, but obviously for the purposes of this assignment, everything needed to be done inside the Insta app.
How did you distribute (the photo or video) you published on Instagram to other social media services?
The video was distributed across tumblr and twitter at the same time as it was posted to Instagram. I used popular hashtags to promote the post (like design, creative etc), but also one niche hashtag named (flipbook). I thought perhaps my content could cut through the ever expanding noise on Instagram if I used a much smaller and more targeted key word, as usually smaller and more niche audiences are also more passionate on Instagram as they receive less content daily that fits their niche.
References:
Hutchinson, A. (2020). Instagram Stories is Now Being Used by 500 Million People Daily. [online] Social Media Today. Available at: https://www.socialmediatoday.com/news/instagram-stories-is-now-being-used-by-500-million-people-daily/547270/ [Accessed 23 Feb. 2020].
Wyzowl. (2020). 25 of the Most Popular Apps for Instagram – REVIEWED. [online] Available at: https://www.wyzowl.com/apps-for-instagram/ [Accessed 23 Feb. 2020].