A3 – Report

Assignment 3 – Report
Name: Mathew Austin s3839815

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

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?

Title of report: Instagram: A Visual Platform Built For Efficiency

Word count: 1085 words

Introduction

Instagram is a social networking service that allows users to create and share image and video content. Originally launched in 2010, Instagram has evolved into a hyper-commercialised and highly efficient system for the creation and distribution of visual content, as evidenced by its market success in gaining over one billion users. A key component to this success is the design of its affordances in the authoring, publishing and distribution stages, creating an unencumbered, streamlined process, resulting in content being able to be produced at a rapid speed, ultimately affecting the look and overall nature of postings on Instagram.

Evidence

For the past 3 weeks, I have been running an Instagram account (@tech.design.rmit) in order to learn about how the affordances of Instagram affect how content is authored, published and distributed. Through this process, I have become acutely aware of the limitations and leniencies given when performing all three steps of content creation. In doing so, however, I also came to the realisation that all components of the Instagram app are designed to aid the user in producing a ‘high quality’ product in as short of an amount of time and with as little effort as possible, blurring the lines between casual and designed photography (Manovich, 2017). This was observed in all three stages of creation and entailed a variety of different affordances to come to this conclusion.

Evaluation

  1. Authoring

The authoring process on Instagram is divided into two distinct components: the camera and the editor.

The Instagram camera is a very cut down and simplified construction, allowing the user to take photos or record video, reverse the camera, enable or disable flash, or upload an image from the camera roll. There are no options provided for managing exposure or any other standard camera features, essentially dumbing down the recording process to a couple of button presses.

When taking both photos and videos within the Instagram app, the frame is limited to a 1:1 aspect ratio, denying the potential for portrait or landscape photography without using an external application, thus limiting the creative process further.

Within the video component, the Instagram camera will only record while the button is being pressed down, stopping once released. This allows the user to crudely edit videos on the fly, removing the need for a separate application or device to take recorded content and edit it together in the traditional sense. Instagram does not afford hands free recording of either photo or video content, meaning that this stage of authoring is temporally restricted to the exact moment the user is recording their images, further streamlining the process of authoring content.

Both the photo and video components of the Instagram camera use simple to understand infer-referential affordances to ecologically prod the user towards making their content now, with as little interference as possible, creating a clear path for the quick creation of content (Gaver, 1991).

The editing stage within the Instagram app is also very cut down and easy to use, with 24 default filters and a handful of image correction sliders being given to play around with. These simplified affordances for editing maximise efficiency over depth and result in images that, with little curation, are edited to look presentable and eye-catching as opposed to professional and proper. This isn’t to say that a professional aesthetic is unachievable, but the affordances of the authoring stage within the app guide users down a path of ‘good enough’ rather than one of quality production. I experienced this when taking photos in the Instagram app and having to adjust shadows and brightness to make sure they weren’t a dark mess because of the poor auto-adjustment.

  1. Publishing

The publishing component of the Instagram app is very simplified, even more so than the authoring component. The captioning options for posting on Instagram, while technically rich text, function more like plain text editors, with no options for text formatting within the application itself. This makes writing captions a straightforward process with little wiggle room in fonts, bold and italics, and line breaking.

Instagram also allows users to use hashtags. When adding hashtags, Instagram will immediately recommend popular tags, and will autofill and provide recommendations for other tags as you type. This clearly increases efficiency by putting the things most likely to get your image seen immediately in your face, and in many cases, giving you the hashtags you want before you’ve even finished typing them. Geotagging follows a similar auto-filling process, with both of these components essentially automating searchability, due to the lack of keyword search (Leaver et al, 2020).

  1. Distribution

A key component of Instagram is its algorithm used to push content to users that may enjoy or interact with it. This means that there is no longer a middleman, or a rigid hierarchy like in the days of broadcast media, with Instagram in theory acting more like guerrilla television, treating all content equally (Berry, 2018). In practice this isn’t entirely true, as more general, advertiser-friendly accounts get more eyeballs, but in my case, I did attract some users with no prior relation to me. Specifically one Japanese user (@n.o.r.i_tama) who was linked to me through the use of Nintendo Famicom related tags, and a musician (@tapesoundmusic) linked to me through MIDI keyboard related postings. This shows that, even with the minimal effort I had to put into distribution, I was able to get discovered in an incredibly efficient manner.

The other component of distribution that is incredibly quick and simple is how Instagram postings can connect with other social media platforms, specifically Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr. When posting content, users only need to tap a switch to immediately ‘crosspost’ to linked social media accounts on different platforms, massively increasing visibility between them (Leaver et al, 2020). As such, a social media empire can be run almost entirely from Instagram without ever having to interact with other platforms.

Conclusion

Instagram has designed its affordances and the structure in which these affordances are presented to the user in such a way that efficiency is prioritised, creating an environment where postings can be made on the spot, edited and hacked together with little effort or understanding of how the actual processes work, and then have these postings distributed not just across Instagram but across the entire internet with almost no onus being placed on the user. This creates a fast-paced nature to Instagram as a place to produce content and has contributed to making Instagram the global juggernaut it is in online visual content distribution.

References:

Manovich, L., 2017. Instagram And Contemporary Image. (part 2, pp 1)

Leaver, T., Highfield, T. and Abidin, C., 2020. Instagram. Cambridge, UK: Polity.

Bjorkmann Berry, T., 2018. VIDEOBLOGGING BEFORE YOUTUBE. Amsterdam: Institute OF NETWORK CULT. (pp 44-45)

Gaver, W., 1991. Technology Affordances. Cambridge EuroPARC. (pp 79-81)

Blog posts and Instagram posts are linked to where appropriate.