My love of media began with classic films, broadcast television and theatre when I was growing up. This led me to study and work in broadcast television on the technical side some years ago. I’m fascinated by how quickly technology and media has changed since then, particularly with mobile technology and social media. During our first lecture, we were introduced to the question that will frame our course networked media. Each week we will reflect on our lectures and readings to dissect this question in our blogs.

How do affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed in the network?

From my experience working in television, I always assumed that the authoring, publishing and distribution were fairly consistent across many forms of media. During our first week, we were shown examples of how this differs.  In television, the authoring is completed by a production company, the publishing is a final edited version ready for broadcast and the distribution would be the television channels that played the content. Whereas with Instagram, the authoring is created by a user through photos and videos, when they post their content they are publishing and distributing simultaneously.  Instagram also allows you to share your post on other platforms, meaning you can increase the distribution. These examples show the difference in the process between platforms. What I find exciting about Instagram is the speed and accessibility, which has a lot of commercial potential, compared with my experience in television years ago.

During our workshop and through the readings, we explored the concept of software and its influence on our daily lives. Manovich (2008, p.8) states

‘I think of software as a layer that permeates all areas of contemporary societies. Therefore, if we want to understand contemporary techniques of control, communication, representation, simulation, analysis, decision making, memory, vision, writing and interaction our analysis cannot be complete until we consider this software layer’.  

In our field, media and communications we should question how software influences what media is.  For example, the traditional role of a photographer has changed with the use of new software such as Instagram.  

Reference:

Khoo E, Hight C, Torrens R, Cowie B 2017, ‘Introduction: Software and other Literacies’ in Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, Springer, Singapore.