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Making Media blog links

Week 9 – Instagram photo
Week 9 – Instagram video
Week 10 – Instagram photo
Week 10 – Instagram video
Week 11 – Instagram photo
Week 11 – Instagram video

This report responds directly to the course prompt:

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

Introduction

In this reflection I’m going to use Don Norman’s concept of affordances, in particular, I’m going to talk about how Instagram restricts and how a culture has been created away from these restrictions. This research has been developed through digital images of my own making media posts, theories, and concepts around the idea of authoring, publishing and distributing in the network. From the very beginning of this course, we can now understand the way digital media has evolved over time, we’ve gone from limited yet talented photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, to now a lifestyle where everyone is a photographer and has an online profile with digital content. (Kuc & Zylinska 2016).

Instagram was designed simply to inspire creativity of life on the go; however, many professional photographers/businesses use Instagram with professional cameras and software’s producing high-quality content, being how users have shaped and changed how Instagram originally shaped there affordances. Everyday users are slowing trying to produce and create the standard of this high-quality stigma around Instagram (Manovich, 2016).

Authoring

In regard to authoring, Instagram users have created a stigma around whether a photo is #instaworthy to upload. Similar to when I was choosing a photo to upload for one of my weekly blogs on whether it seemed aesthetic enough to upload for Instagram. Searching through particular high followed ‘instagramers’ you can straight away see the quality in the pictures; it’s now an online portfolio that the rest of us are trying to keep up with and are inspired by. Instagramers such as Sawyer Hartman mentioned in my blog post 7,  you could see the majority of pictures would’ve been taken on a DSLR camera. When authoring with the aim of high quality, a larger process would’ve been involved. This is similar with video, content creators are using Instagram to show preview’s of there new video they have out on other platforms, this being created in HD imagery through editing programs to have this high-quality content that everyone is trying to keep up with.

For me and everyday users, which there is the majority of, authoring is quite simple and easy. I used the method that Instagram was originally designed to do. However, after actually looking into my process I realized that I was too trying to keep up with trend and stigma created by larger followed ‘instagramers’. I was using other application to get particular filters that are ‘in trend’, I wanted my feed to look ‘in theme’. Theme is a massive part of how we use Instagram and how we created our online look. My whole process would take around 5 minutes on average being the ‘on the go’ method taken on my iPhone. This is also similar with video, I used a different app ‘boomerang’, spoken about in depth on my blog post 11, in order to be up with the current trend which can be taken through one shot only. There’s not a whole lot of tools to put together a creative video on Instagram, just the trimming tool for one clip only, being Instagrams original intention.

I want to also highlight how I wanted to author digital images of doors that included a little bit of me in there too. In my making media posts, I posted 2 with some faces in there. You look at full-time photographer/videographer Sam Evans, every third-fourth post would consist of something he’s doing with his life and that’s personal, rather than just professional photos. You need to have your own personality in your feed in order to attract followers and continuous following (Bakhshi, S, Shamma, D.A , & Gilbert, E 2014).

 Publishing 

How we publish particular digital content is around aiming for post engagement. Captions and tags are the biggest aspects for publishing both video and photo, its how meaning is then created for post engagement. Everyday users captions tend to be their thought process and tagging where they’re. This actually affected what I chose to, in the end, publish a lot. If I couldn’t think of a caption to go with the photo I wouldn’t post it. Hashtags are also used to enable people to find posts of interest through a searching tool.

Tagging companies and places is a big part of the professional stigma on paid posts, which brings me to ‘instagram competitiveness’. Looking at the week 9 reading, users are earning a living off Instagram, users are competing for likes and followers in order to show brands there worth and ‘hip’ and ‘cool’ lifestyle in order to get paid to promote products. Businesses even encourage tagging on Instagram, for example, I was in a restaurant recently and it had on the wall “take a snap of your meal and tag us on Instagram @mrblackjuciery”. You can even see the theme and style of food that this cafe is trying to send to users. People are finding places to go eat and places to go experience, via Instagram and via tags and via hashtags, just with a simple search of location and search of a tag. The visual affordances of Instagram brings places, business, and people to life.

Distributing

The difference in the overall distribution on Instagram compared to other social media became evident to me when I started using other networks. Instagram is purpose-built for photos and video which is how the whole visual appealing theme in individual pages has become such a big aspect. When posting on other networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, there were fewer options, it was harder to find imagery of interest and harder to publish the photo and see the photo in full resolution without different clicks and links. Instagrams affordances have therefore made it easier to distribute digital content in relation to all of the aspect spoken above.

Conclusion

After evaluation and reflection on course content and my workings, Instagram has overtime enforced a certain mode of authoring, publishing and distributing different to other network’s. This has developed by software, users and competitive photography. There are two worlds, those who use Instagram professionally and those who just post what they’re up to, a profile of there chosen digital aspect of there life. Although they’re quite separate, everyone’s Instagram profiles are continually growing in quality, inspired by professionals, instead of turning their life into a business, their Instagram is turning into the theme of there life (Hu, Y, Manikonda, L & Kambhampati, S 2014). Instagram original affordances are exceeding due to user interaction, it has become a way businesses and individual everyday users are showing life and products and authoring, publishing and distributing in a creative way that not only shows art but also shows there aesthetic and trendy life and personality through the digital world.

References:

Bakhshi, S, Shamma, D.A , & Gilbert, E 2014, ‘Faces engage us: photos with faces attract more likes and comments on Instagram’, Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Hu, Y, Manikonda, L & Kambhampati, S 2014, ‘What We Instagram: A First Analysis of Instagram Photo Content and User Types’, Arizona State University.

Instagram, n.d, mrblackjuciery, viewed 21 October 2018, <https://www.instagram.com/mrblackjuicery/>

Instagram, n.d, samevanslife, viewed 20 October 2018.

Instagram, n.d, sawyerhartman, viewed 20 October 2018. 

Manovich, L, 2016, Instagram and the Contemporary Image. University of San Diego.

Zylinska, J & Kuc, Kamila 2016,  Photomediations: A Reader. Open Humanities Press, 2016, available at <http://photomediationsopenbook.net/data/index.html#ch2>.