Here are some initial thoughts and ideas I’ve had in relation to the prompt we were given in class this week:

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

• While most people don’t actively run a blog, a lot of people have an use an instagram account, which is essentially a form of blog. Some of the benefits and appeal of blogs that Miles mentions in his piece “Blogs in Media Education: a Beginning”  therefore may apply to Instagram in that material is posted online for everyone to see, it’s a very public process as opposed to journaling etc. As such blogging and instagramming means that users tailor their working to their audience with the intention of getting feedback from people who follow their account, whether it be through likes, comments or replies.
• Adrian Miles mentions the idea that a group of bloggers who actively engage with each others work can form a sort of community, the affordances of instagram can also in a similar way create communities. E.g. influencers that collaborate, like and comment on each other’s posts and mention or share each others pages. Communities can also form within hashtags – as this is a way of bringing instagram posts and users together and organised.
• Generally people don’t post gripes, rants or bad things on instagram as much as they would on other platforms such as Facebook, Snapchat or Twitter. Instead they post highlights through stories (and maybe make them a permanent “highlight” on their own profile, see first picture and look for number 2) and in that way try to make their life seem as exciting as possible. This can relate to Miles idea that blogs allow you to create an online tone and persona. Instagram’s profile layout is displayed like it is a highlight reel (as number 3 in first photo and the second photo shows.), enabling you to click into each photo to actually read the caption and find out more about each post.  As far as captions go, they may be random like mine, or they may be used to describe the user almost as a way advertising yourself. You know, the captions like “20, Melbourne, loves adventures”.

These thoughts are initial and may not be fully fleshed out yet, but I’m interested to learn more about the impact Instagram has on how we view and produce images and videos in 2018, as well as learning about the positives of blogging for educational purposes.