Posted on March 31, 2019
Networked Media Assignment 1 – Annotated Bibliography
Name: Tessa-May Chung S3662677
I declare that in submitting all work for this assessment I have read, understood and agree to the content and expectations of the assessment declaration – https://www.rmit.edu.au/students/support-and-facilities/student-support/equitable-learning-services
Blog reflections
How do affordances of Instagram affect the way photos and videos are authored, published and distributed?
Annotated Bibliography
Hinton, S & Hjorth L 2013, Understanding Social Media. Sage Publications, London 2013. (pp. 21-31.)
Under a specific section in their book titled, “Using or Being Used?”, Sam Hinton and Larissa Hjorth unpack the media paradox of freedom and control; the conflict between a user’s ability to utilize the many possibilities of the web, and the control that is implemented by governments and administrative authorities. Hinton and Hjorth begin by prefacing the dotcom crash as “proof that the internet was resistant to control” which therefore supports Web 2.0’s quintessential evolution of introducing networking between users anywhere, and at any time. A particular example they give is the Arab Spring in the Middle East, to which utilizing the easy accessibility of the social media has given their small minority a voice, coverage, and support across the world. With an increase in smaller voices finding ways to be heard amongst the competition with larger entities through social media, the governments in some countries sought to understand and engage more effectively with their citizens by paying more attention to this analytics. Therefore, as the number of users begins to increase in their freedom of speech via social media, government monitoring, and data collection also increase, thus a new form of control in the world of New Media is introduced.
Hinton and Hjorth mention Wendy Chun’s contention that it is “the interests of the companies behind these services to foster and develop the illusion of control” (2006), to which this new form of control is not so obvious to the mass users of social media. They explain that while users are given freedom and empowerment by using social media for their benefits, they are also “subject to the control mechanisms of the information society”. The information of users is analyzed and sold so that companies can match ideal products and services through subliminal advertisements to entice users to purchase these goods. Thus, users are given the illusion that services are free for their enjoyment when ultimately, they are being controlled in a much more subtle and calculative way. In regard to Instagram as a popular social media platform, many do not identify this perceived affordance that in lieu of paying for their services, their information is being analyzed and sold to external companies. Although feeling empowered by the capabilities of posting and sharing what users feel that they have authored themselves, there is that “illusion of control” where every action and information of the user is being monitored and managed. As a specific example on Instagram, users are free to choose and select the profiles they follow and have the freedom to like and share whatever to whomever. However, despite feeling empowered with this freedom, their actions are also being analyzed, to which specifically tailored advertisements and perhaps other sponsored profiles are placed in their newsfeed to entice these users. Thus, for a newsfeed that began as a making of the users’ own free will and choice, has implicitly shifted into a corporately controlled collection for the company’s benefit as well.
Ultimately, Hinton and Hjorth do not conclude with a solution for this contradiction of user empowerment with the implicit user information control. However, they also express that “if you want freedom, then you have to submit to control”, suggesting that the dichotomy of freedom and control co-exist in a paradox that will co-evolve with the New Media’s own developing nature.
Niederer, S 2018, Networked images: visual methodologies for the digital age. Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences, Amsterdam. (pp.1-26)
In this article, Dr. Sabine Niederer discusses her research and findings on the evolution of visual platforms on the web, and its relationship with the users as a growing network. She describes the notion of a ‘pictorial turn’ as “a practice driven by users and facilitated by platforms, in which more and more users increasingly share visual content and engage with it.” Hence, the nature of online networking is less of a literal displacement from text to image, and more of an understanding of how users engage with online platforms and its ability to allow a network of authoring, publishing and distributing visual content. This concept becomes the central idea of her studies and arguments as she further discusses the vernaculars of a platform; the distinct “visual language” of each media platform. In 2017, she conducted a subproject looking at the particular visual vernaculars of different social media platforms in regard to the discourse of climate change. Specifically, she looked at Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Twitter, Tumblr and Google Images and was able to highlight the key differences that distinguish each platform from each other, thus noting the affordances and constraints of each platform that determines the nature of how users author, publish and distribute the content.
Particularly looking at her findings for Instagram, she identifies that the platform prioritizes the image aesthetics and that the most engaged – the most popular and trending images – happened to have a total absence of text. In relation to the course prompt, the affordances of Instagram recognized in this study by Niederer can be seen as the visual aesthetics of its layout. Therefore, it can be identified that users who author and publish “beautifully edited” pictures, as opposed to someone who puts more emphasis on text rather than the image aesthetics, receive more recognition and distribution by utilizing Instagram’s affordance of the layout. In comparison to the platform vernaculars of Facebook, Niederer recognizes the emphasis on text-based posts, thus Facebook users aim for “shareable statements” that are mostly non-controversial with large fonts so that other users are more likely to validate the post and feel encouraged to share. Parallel to Instagram, the lack of priority for text may seem like a constraint, but Niederer suggests that the limitations of a platform are what conforms the mappings for the user interface. Thus, in Instagram’s case, users are encouraged to author, publish and distribute aesthetic and visually engaging images due to the platform’s layout that brings more attention to the image rather than to text. Niederer, therefore, concludes with the emphasis of understanding the relationship of the platform vernaculars’ affordances and its relationship with its limitations, which ultimate defines the nature of how users engage and interact with social media platforms.
O’Reilly, T 2005, ‘What Is Web 2.0: Design Patterns and Business Models for the Next Generation of Software’, viewed 1 March 2018, O’Reilly Media Inc., https://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/web2/archive/what-is-web-20.html
This article, written by Tim O’Reilly, elaborates on the fundamental changes and opportunities that the new era of Web 2.0 has created for media and its users. Upon illustrating the nature of Web 1.0 as a single connection between a user and a platform, Web 2.0 is described as the new “power of the web to harness collective intelligence.” Thus, the key point O’Reilly centralises about Web 2.0 is the new opportunities for collective networking.
More specifically, O’Reilly expresses, in regard to the image sharing platform Flickr, that the concept of the categorisation of images is called “folksonomy”, which is defined as the categorising process done collaboratively by using specific keywords; a concept now familiarly known as “tagging”. O’Reilly further discusses the creation of RSS, a program that encapsulates the essence of Web 2.0 by bringing together information and sharing from all over the web. Instead of a user having to manually check for updates on multiple websites, the RSS feed acts as a central figure connecting the user with all their desired websites, allowing users to customise whom they are “subscribed” to and therefore provide notifications whenever there are updates. O’Reilly emphasises how this evolution of the web allows for peer-to-peer interaction, “they can see when anyone else links to their pages, and can respond, either with reciprocal links, or by adding comments,” and although this article was written before the creation of Instagram, one can clearly see how social media platforms today are born from this concept of collaborative integration. Hence, applying these concepts to Instagram, one can deduce that a fundamental reason to Instagram’s success in this new media era is due to its convenient accessibility for users to connect with one another, as well as the ability for the platform to connect with other social media sites. As mentioned previously about the concept of “tagging”, which allows for an overlapping of images and information rather than rigidly structured categories, Instagram implements the use of “hashtags” where users can identify the themes and subjects of discussion of their post, which consequently spreads coverage for their images. A recent example of this is a post by the Fitzroy café and culinary store, CIBI, utilizing hashtags and other tagging hyperlinks with the Melbourne Food and Wine Festival. This concept is the evolution of the RSS that O’Reilly highlights, demonstrating the fast-paced capabilities of hyperlinking that is beneficial for both parties in terms of coverage, support, and networking.
This nature of hyperlinking from an individual entity to another is the essence of what O’Reilly contends in his article; this new age of a “collective intelligence” where minds and crowds are intricately connected through the internet and media. This article is limiting in discussion for the course prompt as it was written 5 years before the creation of Instagram, however, despite its out-of-date perception of New Media, the article still provides an in-depth description and analysis of the beginning of Web 2.0 and the fundamental tools it has provided for the expanding evolution of New Media.