Judging, scrutinising and tracking your online media use can actually become quiet full on. We as millennials are addicted to our phones, tablets, laptops, iPods and the list goes on. Seth’s requested that for the next 7 days we focus in on our media use, I’ve decided that as part of this, each day I’ll delve deep into one part of online media that I find to be interesting or have some sort of merit to it.

My one sector of online media that I used today that I’ll be dissecting is Instagram. Instagram is arguably one of the most used social media platforms, a friend once shared an article with me that said there were over 700 million active users of Instagram daily. This number is phenomenal, considering this is 10% of the world’s population uses Instagram to upload and source images, as well as communicating with others. Instagram has grown their brand tremendously, I remember being one of the first people to use Instagram when it first launched in 2010 and a lot of people would laugh or call it a silly or pointless medium. Now, 7 years later, Instagram has evolved from simply sharing, liking and commenting on photos to something totally different. Nowadays, Instagram can be used to DM (Direct Message) others, share live videos as well as uploading video content, shop products directly from an Instagram account and advertise through Instagram Stories (similar to Snapchat Stories).

I generally scroll through Instagram at any one time for up to 5 minutes and will stop once I’ve reached a post that I’ve already seen. I’ll usually then check the 3 or 4 main accounts that I keep up to date with to see if I’ve missed anything. I will usually like anywhere up to 20 to 30 posts a day and will comment on around 3 to 5 posts depending on if I’m in a good mood or not. Instagram has arguably evolved the most out of any of the mainstream and popular social media platforms, and that’s why I use it so much. I wake up in the morning and one of the first things I do is check Instagram. Not because I’ve put up a photo and am waiting to see how many likes I’ve brought in, but because it’s actually where I get a lot of my daily news from. I follow an account called @TheShadeRoom, these guys are an online Instagram Blog which share celebrity gossip, world news and funny tidbits and clips from across the web. In the past couple of days, I’ve received information from The Shade Room about topics such as the London Terror Attack, Kendrick Lamar’s new single that he dropped as well as first seeing the hugely viral video that Melbourne’s own ice-creamery Scroll’d put out where they mashed up a cheeseburger and turned it into an ice-cream scroll. I haven’t posted anything on Instagram for a long time, purely because I’ve been busy as hell so finding good content has definitely gone on the back-burner, and I don’t feel as though for me, a 20 year old boy, posting on Instagram isn’t a priority in my life. I would rather spend my time on Instagram searching through accounts such as @TheShadeRoom to keep up to date with everything that is going on around me and in the world.