My partner Sem and I’s Instagram experiment:

Earlier today, my partner Sem and I experimented with the concept of interacting with and audience on Instagram through the use of Insta stories. We used the unique feature of Instagram stories, that place limitations on the length of videos being posted, to tell a story that was meant to be interpreted as a real life call for help, as I acted as though someone had taken my bag, and i was being followed by a random stranger. Our aims were to test how interactive Instagram as an online platform could be, and to see if we could get a response to our SOS.

It was very much a trial by error, as we quickly found problems to deal with, such as how we were going to film it. In order to appear spontaneous and real, we had to film portrait at all times to imitate how someone holds their phone, making use of captions instead of talking at times, filming with the inner camera ‘vlogger style’ (talking directly to the viewers), or filming POV style. We also had to consider that we should shoot all of the posts beforehand, outside of Instagram, to make room for error and re-shooting some takes that we were unhappy with. This in itself, however, became a problem we later found out, because some of the shots lasted longer than the Instagram story cut-off time, which turned out to be 16 seconds instead of 10.

In terms of interacting with our audience, we used methods such as asking questions, using hashtags to as them to help, even a polling function available on the story itself to ask the opinions of anyone watching. However much to our dismay, we did not get much in terms of audience interaction, but we speculated that reasons for that could be related to regularity of previous posts and popularity, both areas in which I lack on my Instagram account.

Regardless of the outcome, I still think this experiment went well, as it allowed us to brainstorm ways of interacting with people over social media, and using social media as a platform for online screen content creation. In relation to the lack of people responding to our story, I wish in future to create a similar experiment on other social media sites such as Facebook or reddit, where interaction of a deeper level is more widely accepted and encouraged, to view the difference in reactions with that of Instagram.

The past two weeks of the studio ‘Thinking in Fragments’ have been spent discussing the properties of online media making; the formal qualities of online content, and what makes them web-specific. The form that i have chosen to explore and research, is the interactive abilities of the internet, and how this feature allows the internet to be a unique and diverse space.

I found the thought of the interactive capabilities of the internet increasingly interesting after listening to the ideas in class.My overall impression of the internet was just a big ball of information, that people could access and take snippets out of, but I’ve come to realise it’s so much more than that. To think that it has become such a big place, where people can communicate, post up on, share, comment on and more importantly, contribute to; it has evolved so much from the introduction of Web 2.0, which is a topic that was also discussed in class that i found interesting. Its astounding to think about how many different facets of interaction there are between both users and the interface in terms of blogs, forums, pages, sites, and many other platforms where people can come to share their ideas of business, interests, skills, and even entertainment.

This train of thought, led me to the idea of social media. Social media is usually the first thought that pops into anyone’s head when thinking about interaction on the internet, and I wanted to explore just how it hooks us all in just by being a platform where everyone can share everything. However, in these types of spaces that encourage video/photography content, a question was raised to me: “What makes this type of content web specific?” I considered Youtube, being a multimedia type platform that has immense popularity by the ability to watch, post or share videos of all kinds, and how it was different at all to TV, or movies, or video content that isn’t of the internet. I considered how the videos themselves were different to those of non-web origin, in that TV series and films usually display a story, or advertisements try to sell something, or teach certain skills, where Youtube has so much more variety, such as pranks, tutorials, vlogs, gaming series, personalities, parodies, reviews, etc. I realised that the main differences lay in the platform itself, and the interactivity it encouraged. the ability to comment, give advice/opinions, to reach out to the content creators themselves, to share it cross platform to sites like Facebook, to review the content itself, to contribute, to even make your own content.

In our classroom discussions, we discussed how this concept of social media being so unique, as people constantly find new ways to explore the capabilities of what they can accomplish in such a space; from conducting strange or confronting ‘social experiments‘, to evolving different kinds of niche jokes and a style of humour, to just discussing theories and stories of things like their favourite TV series and hobbies. From this, my partner Sem and I looked into Instagram stories, and how through a medium where people usually share parts of their lives through, a story could be told by manipulating the limits and restrictions of videos posted; seeing them as ways to segment the story and add new parts to the ‘whole’. We discussed the differences between a social media site like Instagram versus a more interactive site like Facebook or reddit. We saw Reddit as an example as an interface where a post can receive a whole host of comments, which individually, those comments can gain responses of their own, creating their own ‘thread‘, thus turning one post into a crossroads leading off down many branching out pathways, tracks, side streets and alleyways. This idea of a community built on such posts differs greatly from the idea of Instagram, where people just post photos, or short videos as a more one-way interaction from creator to viewer; showing off rather than trying to spark large scale debates or conversations. 

Sem and I decided to test the interactive capabilities of a more one-way interactive platform by posting up an SOS of sorts on my Instagram story, similar to a ‘social experiment’ mentioned above, detailing a short story where my bag is swapped and I try to find the person that has my bag, while being followed by a mysterious and possibly dangerous person. During the sequential videos, we plan to call out to my ‘audience’, with the intent of getting responses to my plight, either trying to help me find my bag, or inquiring for my safety.

For this experiment, we have to think about how we plan to record and store this series of videos uploaded to my story, and also work around the fact that videos can be no longer than around 10 seconds. Because of these limitations, we also have to consider the length of our ‘story’, and how to gather safe responses from our audiences without inciting panic. We don’t want them to call the police to help me from some creepy ‘stranger’. I believe this experiment will involve a lot of trial and error, but I hope it does gather some sort of response from our viewers and friends.