• Why I use Instagram?

When I read the Course Prompt on the lecture notes, the first question jumped into my mind is “what’s the first reason that I use Instagram?”. I do clearly remember that the first reason that I downloaded was not that I was interested in it or I wanted to touch with some interesting information on it, the reason was I ‘need’ it. Instagram is a popular social media in Melbourne, for the students who are new here like me in three years ago, it’s a great way to know your new friends’ life and let your new friends know your life. However, three years have been passed, my early thoughts had been changed. Now, Instagram became the application that I look for interesting things.

• Why I like Instagram?

There are many social media applications on my mobile device and the Instagram is definitely not my first choice when I want to waste my time on the entertainment. However, there are still some reasons listed it as one of my top favorites. I do believe these reasons are the advantages of Instagram as well.

The Instagram mainly focuses on the photos or images, not like other social media, the text description plays the role of complement to the photo or image. When I was tired or bored of reading a long text description, Instagram is definitely my first choice. I mean, it is an excellent affordance of Instagram authoring, publication and distribution, I pay more attention to how beautiful and interesting your photos or images are, not your description, you could edit some text description or not, or you could just add the hashtag, or you could only upload your images with nothing. Also, there is an amazing part of the Instagram distribution, I could have a look all posts on the same page and it does not take me a long time. For example, I noticed a post and I was interested in, I only took several seconds to view all posts of this account and determined the style I liked, then followed it.

Another affordance of Instagram I like is the Instagram always promotes “similar content” to me. For instance, I recently like to check out the content of hashtags #whatsinmybag, #hitpan and #dog. I could not memorize how many times I clicked these hashtags, how many times I ‘like’ and ‘comment’ on these posts, I even uploaded a dog post. My homepage thus showed up content related to the bags, cosmetics and dogs. It reminds me of the concept indicated by authors in the Software Literacy reading. What we are experiencing is not provided by the fixed documents, it created by the dynamic outputs in real-time. From my personal experience, I am interested in the bag, cosmetics and dogs now, my Instagram homepage shows up the similar content, but I was interested in other stuff before, like books and reading, the homepage showed up some recommended books as well, I also remember the Instagram promoted me some beautiful views photos of Melbourne when I lived in Melbourne. Besides, I believe the content of my friends’ Instagram homepage is different from mine, on their homepage, there might be something they recently searched and interested in. The content promoted by the Instagram varies from people, time and even space, it is not mechanized and constructed by some static documents, it identifies, analyses, recognize and located what you might be interested in, what you posted and even where you have been. Therefore, the media experience constructed by the Instagram software involves the dynamic changes of a real-time, which was defined as ‘software performance’ by Software Literacy.