The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos | Hacker News Reader

The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos

hyperallergic.com

93 pointsbspn54 comments

How many millions of people are posting on Instagram? How many billions of photos are on Instagram now?

Is it really so crazy to think that all of those billions of photos, you can find groupings of 12 that are similarly composed? How many unique photos are there to take really?

I'd be way more impressed if you could somehow come up with a set of a billion photos such that there are no compositional groupings across the set. Earth only has so many types of things on it to photograph.

If you take photos to remember something then you can have a lot of unique photos. While everyone else is chasing the perfect photo you'll have something that is actually true to the memory.

i am like this too. i have lots and lots of janky photos that aren't insta-worthy but fulfill their core purpose as little time machines

Wow, this comment just got me thinking. If I've got good at taking well composed photos, according to common photography techniques, might they have less of that time-machine, memory-jogging quality? I'd like to have both - maybe I need two sets for photos!

You take photo to forget. You let objects to save that memory for you so that you can forget. Sure you still remember some, and some pointers of images.

Wise words bigDICK

I read one bit of utopian fiction where the propagation of digital production was limited to a nearby social circle. That way, people weren't constantly comparing their photographs with the best photographer in the world, or their musical compositions with the best musician in the world. People would specialize and create things, but for the benefit of their social circle, not the entire world. I wonder if something like that, but for Instagram, might be worth considering.

Sounds like Google+! I love the idea, I can be the dedicated (dark) bard for my group of friends. The realities of the situation are probably vastly different, but hey, I need hope.

i don't think comparing your photo with the best photographer in the world is necessarily a bad thing, it shows you what you haven't learnt yet and how composition/lighting changes things.

if you translate that into FOMO somehow i think that's on your broken code/way of living rather than anything else.

It's easy enough to create a private profile on Instagram and only post things for the benefit of your close friends. I have an account for exactly this purpose.

People are not creating that stuff for others, they are creating it for themselves.

I don't need a social circle which creates content for me.

I'm quite happy that evolution and the masses created tv shows like GoT or other professional high quality content.

While it is indeed true that humans share a large number of traits that naturally homogenize, to an extent, how we think and act, I'd bet it is ultimately Instagram's interconnectedness between users which favors this kind of content replication. Quantifying social validation by means of like, comment, and follower counts make other users' reactions predictable and, thus, exploitable; I think people who take this kind of hackneyed photos or videos are doing so because they have been proven to work--they already have feedback for that kind of aesthetic and narrative artifices, because they have already been posted by popular accounts and have gotten good results.

I’ve been seeing a lot of these articles lately. We need someone to write about the alarming homogeneity of articles about the similarity of Instagram photos.

the comments here are alarmingly h... well you know the rest.

Sources please.

loosely related, but here is an amazing project by Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom (20 years in the making) that explores the topic of 'homogeneity': https://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/20-years-of-photos-sh...

(the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0714867152)

...and even more amazing one by Ari Versluis (also Dutch): http://www.exactitudes.com

I think this type of work is much better evidence for the claim of cultural homogeneity from the article: The photo series are all taken within short time windows of a couple of hours in the same location.

Instagram on the other hand contains billions of pictures from multiple locations taken over long periods of time. It is only natural to find some repetition and much harder to argue how much of that repetition can be attributed to lack of creativity.

Isn't this akin to complaining if people for access to tools for drawing, that there would be a lot of fruit bowls out there? The fact is, cameras on cell phones have brought artistic tools to an incredibly large set of people, and of course there is to be expected alot of mimicry. But lots of originality can come through. Browse through Dribbble sometimes. There can be plenty of creativity in remixes and covers of others work.

I imagine if someone built Instagram for ancient Greek art and analysed it they could rediscover things like the Golden Ratio. And those Doric columns... all the same.

And with photography much of it isn't mimicry per se so much as the fact that humans find a lot of similar things interesting even if they pay no attention to other people's artwork at all. Even if entirely uninterested in other people's travel shots, people often find the rowing boat trip they took with their partner interesting enough to record a picture of their partner taken from said rowing boat, and so we end up with a lot of shots of partners sitting in the prow which can't really not be compositionally similar to other shots of other partners sitting in other boats on other rivers.

Those photos all look amazing. Now I want to replicate those shots and put them on Instagram.

This comment made my day. :)

This has less to do with Instagram and more to the fact that all art is derived from other art.

It has more to do with the fact that most humans are social and cultural mimics, and genuine creativity is rare - and not always welcome when it appears.

Could it have anything to do with the sheer volume and accessibility of 'art' in the modern world? There was a time where thousands of people had to favor an artist/photographer's style in order for them to rise to prominence. Nowadays with people scrolling through hundreds or thousands of Instagram posts a day and voting with their thumbs, the barriers to entry into the 'art' world are much lower.

As an artist I find looking at art on a phone sized device nauseating. I think the size of the ultimate image makes creating homogeneous images much more likely as you can only see the barest hint of detail, even on a retina screen. Seurat's famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is an enormous painting, but seeing it on small screen makes it look like a comic.

I feel the the homogeneity is a result of what they’re looking for - people sharing pictures of their vacations are not the same as people trying to be “influencers”.

I don’t think any of the travel pictures I see on Instagram of shared albums on Mac/iOS are like these. But then I’m not following influencers, I’m following friends and family (travel photos), and dogs (no travel photos, but definitely dogs)

If I went to any of those locations I’d take a picture that looks exactly like that but there is a huge difference - the people in it are me or my close ones. And the people watching my travel pictures are our friends.

People who follow random people on Instagram are the enigma, not that they all take the same photos.

Trust HN commenters to call into question the (perfectly reasonable) premise of the article.

The fact that Instagram is visual, not drably textual like HN, shouldn't really prevent anyone from discerning the fact that there's a significant amount of imitation, cliché, and trendy conformity in the images people post.

In an attempt to appear unique, everyone ends up doing the same thing.

Instagram is just a reflection of what society does in real life. This is visible in fashion, hair styles, beard, and whatever is the trend now.

I personally don’t understand why so many people have this need to look like their peers. Does anyone with more social skills have an explanation?

It's pretty simple, and really not caused by people attempting to appear unique. There are two main factors: 1. All humans has a need to be accepted and approved of by their peers, 2. Humans also have an essentially identical neural architecture and a very similar set of likes and preferences to their peers. This results in groups of people with similar habits, clothes, and so on. The vast majority of humans normally want to fit in and conform, rather than be the odd one out in a group, see the entry on tribalism in any good anthropology textbook.

Also, anyone who claims not to understand this is either lying, engaging in some form of virtue signalling or has some sort of mental illness.

But take computer games, for instance. The main character (or any important character) is usually very different from everyone around them. Both in the way they act, but also the way they look. Nobody wants to play as the NPC.

To me, that applies to real life as well. But it would seem that a lot of people want to stand out in a video game/movie/book etc., but conform in real life?

There are obvious disadvantages to being the PC -- your life is not stable or safe. In real life, there are no save points. It's not so surprising that people live real life as an NPC, but fantasize about the excitement of being a PC, and consume media that allows them to indulge that fantasy without risk.

Not everyone can be the protagonist in real life, but they can imitate a prominent person and thereby associate themselves with that person's success and prestige. It's a variety of narcissism in which less successful people deal with their narcissistic urges by becoming "followers".

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_narcissism#The_char...

Related to 2: sellers actively exploit our preferences, which probably creates a feedback loop where we buy the same kinds of clothes, accessories, etc.

I'll add a third, more mundane option, somewhat related to 2: default behavior. I think we generally prefer to do whatever takes the least amount of effort, and comforming is generally easier than the alternative.

> Also, anyone who claims not to understand this is either lying, engaging in some form of virtue signalling or has some sort of mental illness.

Let’s assume you are right and there are only these three possibilities, what kind of mental illness would you suggest I have?

Since I was a little kid it never appealed to me to do what most of my friends were doing just because they were doing it.

A fourth option would be that I never cared about it enough to actually look for the reasons.

I'd suggest that if you genuinely don't understand this sort of social thing instinctively, then you're probably on the autism/aspergers spectrum then. I really wasn't trying to be offensive towards you or anything, I just probably forgot some extra caveats... Basically, this sort of social reasoning is (usually) hard wired into your (typical) human being, and has been since prehistory. But mental disorders like autism seem to mess up social perceptions and interactions, masking these instincts. Fortunately, in that case, I've found it's possible to work around the issue by simply researching what the natural instincts and drivers are for the typical human, hence my suggestion of referencing an anthropology textbook.

> In an attempt to appear unique, everyone ends up doing the same thing.

Time and again it is said about people subscribing to various subcultures or styles: "they think they are unique but they all are the same!" However I have never once heard or seen anyone in any such group actually claim to be unique.

Indeed, what they (members of said sub-culture) all are is collectively different to, or in some way deviating too far from, whatever the current social norms, mores, or accepted majority cultural standards are. In this way, the group as a whole will appear unique compared to the majority of the population, who (usually) behave, dress and act in a (mostly) homogeneous way according to whatever the culture deems normal and within (somewhat) acceptable deviations.

I doubt that people posting these images are trying to be unique, they are chasing status.

We do that here too. Think of when people bring up the phrase "if it's free then you are the product." The first few times it's seen by people, they think that's a great way to describe what they're seeing, and it spreads like wildfire. Now it's to the point I groan when I inevitably see it during a discussion.

This is really just the propagation of ideas which have sex: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ideas-having-sex-matt-ridley...

Black Mirror's Nosedive episode did up all the sets, scenery, costumes, and makeup as one gigantic Instagram post.

https://www.instagram.com/socalitybarbie/ would fit into many of these

It's like she's got the exact same expression on her face in every picture. It's almost doll-like.

And if I hadn't been looking for the joke, I'd have done a double take, because it does look exactly like a real account from a distance.

Shouldn't that be self-evident? Humans have a lot in common and so do the things they find attractive or memorable. Even if someone attempted to be the world champion of uniqueness, in a population as large as Instagram users that would be hard to accomplish.

How is this alarming? Who gives a toss if people who want to be "influencers" are all doing the same thing? Frankly it makes it easier for the humans to ignore them.

The author is struggling with the fact that humans are overwhelmingly a mimicry bunch.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's the only way there can be billions of people. The automation & cloning process when it comes to personality, choices, behavior, likes, dislikes, etc. saves an incredible amount of time at scale.

30 minutes spent reading comments on Reddit or Imgur for example reveals that almost everybody is copying everybody else on there. You see witty lines, factoids, memes, repeated ad nauseam for years. The moment someone comes up with something new, it's immediately copied for hopeful points (attention and validation of existence; I think those things lacking is a serious and common issue for most people, which is why it works so well as a system in communities).

Imagine if everyone on Reddit, to post something, had to be original. 99%+ of the site instantly disappears. The effort or type of brain required to come up with new, very entertaining memes for example. Humanity wouldn't get anything else done if that much originality was required of all things, it's a division of labor applied to social everything.

There's nothing to be alarmed about. In my opinion most people have nothing interesting or original to contribute (by default I think it would have to be that way), so they copy everything from the more interesting tiny minority and it gets passed down the chain in a cascade of mimic. Most of humanity is a lifestyle and behavior clone top to bottom. Humanity is a tribe of organized copying, passing down what works from one person to the next to save time.

It takes either a particularly outstanding character/personality/thinking abnormality, or a large amount of effort, to do something original when the composition comparison is a billion other people.

Interesting. Kind of like how the evolution of our DNA works - we are fundamentally just imperfect replicators, introducing random mutations to the information. Ones that are deemed beneficial are propagated further, others are ostracized.

Reminds me of the XKCD experiment of an IRC channel that kicks you if your sentence isn't unique:

https://blog.xkcd.com/2008/01/14/robot9000-and-xkcd-signal-a...

I for one am utterly amazed that a social media platform does not actually foster creativity and originality. What.A.Surprise

One could say the same about HN comments. ;)

Congratulations! I tried to be clever and find this exact comment, but somewhat surprisingly yours is unique!

It´s called genre.

Yeah, some people lack imagination. I used to make electronic music. I lack imagination. I wasn't good at it. But I had fun doing it nonetheless.

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