“What is blogging?” “Isn’t Instagram a blogging? I had an Insta account, why should I set up another blog for daily sharing?.”
Yet, I knew nothing about blogging.
Although, I am a media student and I always plan to do a blog about travel or beauty but I never did one. Indeed, maybe this is the moment for me to set up a blog.
Basically, blogging to me is something similar to publishing something on Instagram. During the first tutorial, Elaine – our tutor guided us to think about “what is blogging?” I thought for a minute, “Blogging should be creative and unique, thus creating echo and vibes. ” A classmate during the tutorial also suggested that blogging is a platform to share, can be informative and resourceful or personal. Summing up, blogging should be something like that.
However, these days, social media is taking over the usage of blogging. One of the reasons is that social media platforms such as Instagram, Facebook and Twitter are much more convenient than writing blogs, they can create a post at any time. At the same time, social media is more user-friendly, people are carefree about their use of language, tone, spellings or grammar. It is much easier for them to create the content to their audience, sometimes including ourselves. Isn’t that more easy?
For me, as a frequent user of Instagram, I do upload photos, sometimes with captions underneath, it depends. It is common to see posts on Instagram with only photographs plus maybe three or five words with some emoji, some only include tags. Yet, I observed that Instagram users do not emphasize the content they published, rather than they focus on the structure of the photos.
A question here, how many seconds would you take on a post when scrolling Instagram?
For me, half a second.
Words underneath would not attract your eyeball but photo does, when people saw a great photo or post they would just double tap (like) without reading the content. Indeed, some internet influencers (we called “KOL” in Hong Kong) would post photographs that are well-structured, color tuned, edited, with beautiful gestures or sexy outfits that would attract your gaze. This is because they would get more likes from their followers and more awareness from the internet. Therefore, words are not that crucial when comparing with blogging in Instagram.
Our course prompt, “How does the affordance of Instagram affect the way photo and video authorised, published and distributed in the network?” This question will be discussed and discovered at the end of the course. Indeed, I still do not have any idea of how the affordability of Instagram affects the way of people’s self presentation. Yet, with the advance and popularity of those social media platforms, it is ordinary to see a similar structure of post being published. So I am certain that the way people distribute photos is more or less being affected by the usage of Instagram.
Social media is becoming crucial to our lives, when it comes to software is it not difficult to find out it is in everyday living.
Can you get rid of the software to live? I think it is a “No” for me.
Mentioned in the book “Software Literacy Education and Beyond”, cultural software could foster a wide range of activities like word processing, image manipulation and access to cultural work (Khoo et al., 2017, P.4). Yet the social media platform such as Instagram is acting as this role in the community. The affordance of it varies, however, as it dominates, the way that the user uses is somehow nearly the same.
References
Khoo, E., Hight, C., Torrens, R. and Cowie, B. (2017). Software Literacy: Education and Beyond, SpringerBriefs in Education, Singapore