Instagram for non-believers
fr.anc.is
fr.anc.is
I can fully understand why Instagram was worth $1B. It enabled enhanced ego-stroking because it took tedious photographs and made them look like they were cool without any effort.
Don't blame the platform for enabling people to be who they really are.
I think the issue here is that McLuhan was absolutely right when describing how the medium actually transforms and filters the messages that are sent through it. It's worth reading "Understanding Media" (or "The Medium is the Massage") because one of his key points is that the apparent content of the messages being sent across a medium is a distraction for what's really going on (the societal change brought about by the medium itself).
In the case of social networking the medium is broadcasting a message that it's normal to continuously stream updates, pictures etc. about your daily life as if the people following you cared about that. The fact that they do care about it is simply a sign that the medium is shaping society to the social network's particular medium.
Also, it's worth considering the difference between a one-to-one sharing of something (let's say a picture of your child shared with your mother) and the broadcasting of information to a chosen social group.
The former is a personal interaction which has many subtexts (proud parent showing off their child, wanting to connect with your own parent), whereas the broadcast does not have the same depth. It's just "look at me".
On the other hand, isn't this position essentially saying that because the things in your life are similar to others and not surprising, they aren't valuable and worthy of documentation?
What's wrong with "look at me?" Am I not worthy of being looked at by my friends because I haven't done something remarkable? Just because my kid isn't really all that different from every other kid, or thousands of other people were also at that concert (and my photos are mediocre at best). . .
And if I share something actually remarkable that I've done, it's just "bragging," right?
I don't log in to facebook very often. But when I do, what else should I expect to see but what's going on in their lives?
My instinct is the same as yours--to hold back and be private. To not share my life with others, because they might be bored. To not document my everyday triumphs and failures, because they're not really that different from anyone else's.
But I have a sneaking feeling we might be wrong about this one. Maybe our boring human lives are worth documenting and sharing.
However, I think jgrahamc and you are speaking to different things. There is documentation, much like our parents did when we went to the beach as a toddler and we took that picture with mom and the sandcastle, and then there is personal curation that lives in narcissism and strikes me as dishonest (or too honest, perhaps).
There is sharing triumphs and failures, and then there is bounding triumph and failure with one's personal accounts as to make the world about the documenter instead of about the documenter as part of, well, the world.
I'm not sure I have this idea completely worked out as this seems subjective and who can really judge another's motives with absolute certainty. All I know is there is a fine line and we would be careful to hold ourselves to a standard that encourages sharing life without making life about ourselves.
After all, you can't be open source (which we LOVE) when you're all closed-sourcey yourself.
Anyway, just a little food for thought that came into my head with your observations.
I take pictures of my kids, things we're doing, or interesting things that I see in my daily life. When OP says "narcissism", he's either following much different people than I do, or he doesn't know what narcissism means.
Publishing all your pictures, all the time is like carrying a projector with slides from random moments in your life to every party you ever go to and setting it up for everyone to see whether they asked you to or not.
It sounds like a crazy thing to all of us who are aware of how things used to be.. but maybe for the next generation this is going to be cultural norm. I don't want to be judgmental and I'm not a psychiatrist so I can't tell if that's positive or negative or even if it's a long-term or short-term phenomenon, but at least for right now, that seems to be how we're evolving.
We're just so immersed with our own life, that we never stop and consider whether others would actually care if we shared something.
And a platform can enhance the narcissism. Take any humble person and throw him into Twitter, and he/she can't help but tell everyone about their great life, or how they suffer more than others.
Nope, I still don't get it.
I've never used Instagram, so bear with me: when I take a picture with my phone, I click on the share button, pick where I want to share (Facebook, Twitter, email, text) and I'm done. Pretty simple. What is Instagram removing from that process to make sharing more simple?
Now maybe I can explain why people are astonished with what Instagram was bought for: they built an apparently amazing product, but it wasn't something that couldn't have been built by Facebook (or any other number of companies) rapidly and cheaply. It was the user base. Essentially, Instagram sold your "attention" to Facebook for $1BB.
You mentioned three steps.
1) > I take a picture with my phone
2) > I click on the share button
3) > pick where I want to share (Facebook, Twitter, email, text)
With Instagram
1) take the picture
Done, filters are optional, and the sharing is built in. Also, reducing the size (to i think... 600*600 pixels or so) makes it incredibly fast to upload even in crappy edge/gprs networks.
It's the overly used image that bothers me most because that person needs the traffic and their image is pretty popular yet they never get accreditation for it.
[1] http://hyperboleandahalf.blogspot.co.uk/2010/06/this-is-why-...
Ironically this is relevant to the discussion. Memes are kind of like Instagram (I imagine there are other similar phenomenons). They share the instant gratification of a trigger-like social connection between a huge mass of people, but lack all the fulfillment and self-discovery that REAL content can bring. But it's really not surprising that things like Instagram and memes thrive in the digial-social space. Most people will generally get a much higher response to a "MY CAT HAZ GLASSES!" fake polaroid, then to share something like "Hi all my friends, I read this insightful 5 page article on adulthood and I think you all might get something out of it too."
It sort of reflects a broader-scale problem with people just not having time (or not wanting to bother) with discussing things like sex, politics, art, religion, relationships... They'd rather just share some Ha-Has, small talk and get drunk. I think this is especially pronounced in North America and in large urban centers.
On a related note: the Google+ Instant Upload feature does even 'better'. From the G+ website: "All photos and videos taken with your mobile device are uploaded to the From your phone album. These photos and videos are only visible to you unless you share them." That's even more frictionless sharing, but not in a way I like: it freaked me out when I inadvertently turned this on.
Is that the right interpretation?
Add people inevitably complaining 'Dude, you're posting 5 pictures of your cat EVERY DAY!', and having separate, photo-only social network suddenly makes sense.
Or rather "don't pay attention to the google" :)
The real value of Instagram is the social network behind it. Photos are the easiest way of sharing what you're doing. You don't need to write a word, you just hold out your phone, snap a picture and upload it. And from the other side it's exactly the same, you don't even need to read to know what your friends are doing, you just glance over the picture stream.
Obviously you can do exactly the same on Facebook and Twitter, but by focussing on just photos Instagram has cut away all the clutter. And if you want to share what you're doing (or should I say seeing?) with friends who are not on Instagram, you can still flick the sharing switch.
Instagram is not about making the photo production process easier. It's about making the photo consumption process easier, so that the photos you take get more attention from others (and you have more fun).
You could share your photos to Facebook or Twitter instead, but when users view their streams from those other sites, they're confronted with either a sea of text (Twitter) or a sea of mixed content in non-standard formats (Facebook). Catching up on your Facebook feed is impossible, so nobody does it. Twitter is a bit better because the posts are in a standard format, but still, reading tweets takes a bit of time.
Contrast this with Instagram. I'm following over 200 people and I can catch up on an entire day's worth of photos in about 5 minutes. Because it's faster to view an image than read a tweet, and because of the standard post format, Instagram is literally the fastest way possible for me to see what my friends and family have been up to.
To me, that's the real value of Instagram.