The Interface as a Digital Meme
Analyzing Instagram’s digital culture and its correlation to memes
Instagram is a popular photo and video sharing social networking service that proves itself to be a cultural powerhouse of this generation. It provides users unique ways to post pictures and videos using their smartphones to the platform, and apply different manipulation tools (Hu et al., 2014, p. 596). Archiving your personal life and sharing it through various online communities and individuals is what allows Instagram to cultivate a social connectivity that is very relevant today. In recent news, Uber Eats has announced the new added features to the service; one being the option for a restaurant operator to integrate their Instagram feed. This gives them the ability to post updates like menu changes, specials and news for customers to the newly launched “Merchant Stories”, which operates like a Facebook’s status update or a Twitter tweet that will stay on the operator’s page for a week (Fantozzi, 2021). Implementations as such can give us an insight to the sociocultural environment of social media platforms and the possible effects it has on creating our future digital products and services.
Research question: How can Instagram’s interface be analyzed as a design meme?
Theoretical Framework
The theoretical framework is based on the premise of the sociocultural environment Instagram resides in, and relating it to the nature of digital memes. We can begin to analyze the aesthetic of Instagram’s interface as a behaviour rather than artifact through the influence of the human condition in pattern recognition and our governed social norms. By the nature of memes as a shared social phenomenon; a dissemination of cultural knowledge in its essence, we can use this model to analyze Instagram’s digital culture and its cultural importance for self-promotion.
Walkthrough
Instagram’s vision is to solve three problems, 1) to turn amateur/mediocre photos into professional-looking snapshots by the use of their filters, 2) the pain of sharing on multiple platforms — Instagram gives you the ability to instantly share content(s) on multiple services, and 3) most uploading experiences are clumsy, therefore Instagram optimized the experience to be fast and efficient. As part of Facebook’s products, the company generates revenues for Facebook‘s overall business model (Bhatt, 2018). Instagram’s operational model is based on profits from visual advertisements. The app’s governance is able to sustain their operating model and fulfil their vision as intended. However, there are some privacy concerns that could be alarming to some users due to Instagram’s licensing rights on a user’s content and the sharing of ones identity to other users and third parties (ToS;DR).
This section focuses on two Instagram features: “Story” and “Reels”. The Story feature is a secondary feed (horizontal) that is located at the very top of your main feed. You can identify it by the marked photo bubbles of the users you follow. When you have not watched a particular story, these photo bubbles are highlighted with a gradient ring around it to signify the lack of action. However, when you are “up to date”, or have watched a user’s story, the gradient ring then turns to white, and the opacity of the “following” username decreases to indicate such action. When tapping any one of these bubbles, you can see the user’s story they published over the last 24 hours. After tapping a story, it fills your screen and auto-plays the stories according to the order they are in by default. You have the option to go back by tapping the left side of the screen, or move forward by tapping the right side of the screen. Skipping stories are also possible by swiping left or swiping right to skip back to the previous story. When publishing your own story, you can do so by tapping the top left bubble containing your profile picture, labelled “Your Story”, or quickly swipe right while on the main feed. This will give you access to the Story camera tab, where you can take photos or videos and manipulate them to your liking. While on this tab, you have options to use filters and editing tools that allows you to apply photo layouts, effects, text, etc., which is located on the left edge of the screen.
Instagram “Reels” is a fairly new feature that provides a new way of recording videos into 15 to 30-second clips, and allowing you to add music. Just like how you would publish a story, you can create Reels by simply swiping to the appropriate tab: “Reels”. When on the Reels camera tab, the layout is consistent and similar to “Story”. A button located in the mid-bottom area is present to capture, and an editing tool box is found on the left edge of the screen as well. Users have the ability to set the duration, select music, adjust speed, add filters and effects, and set a timer. The in-app editing tools also enables you to split multiple pieces of video to provide you more customization when applying effects, music, etc.
Analysis: The interface as a meme
The walkthrough has given us an insight of the interface’s aesthetic and the possible sociocultural environment for its existence. However, we must note the timeline of such features and the existing products that coincide during their releases. Instagram’s Story feature was initially released in October 2016 (RevLocal). But during this time, another social networking app, called Snapchat already had this feature released in 2013 with the same name and capabilities as Instagram Stories (Mastorakis, 2018). Snapchat’s success was due to the result of its stories feature. Reels on the other hand was introduced in 2020. Just like the Story feature, it resembles a concept of another social networking app, called TikTok, which is one of the most popular apps today. TikTok also had an earlier release date than Instagram, which was in 2016. Instagram Reels and TikTok are very similar when it comes to its interface and functions, with few minor differences in time limits and music licensing.
We may identify Instagram’s application of these features to be relevant to the existing products that play a significant role in digital culture. Therefore, we can begin considering the aesthetic of these features, and aesthetic as a behaviour.
Aesthetic in the context of digitalization, according to Birdle, “signals a kind of saturation point whereby the obscure ubiquity of digital, networked and mobile devices inspires a struggle to map, document, and record” (Berry & Dieter, 2015, p. 5)
In relation to Instagram Story and Reels, one can argue that their interfaces could be a result of perpetuated knowledge through repetition. Chun drives this point home when she explained that repetition, “both makes possible and impossible the archival process” (Chun, 2008, p. 13). It’s only if something is repeated that it’s been disseminated. And if we didn’t repeat them, it would then be lost. The rise of ephemeral content is evident today, and we continue to see it flourish. For example, Twitter had announced their own version of the Story feature, called “Fleets” (which has been discontinued and removed as of 2021), which follows the same premise of Instagram and Snapchat Stories of sharing transitory thoughts (Twitter). Such integrations may work as justification of judgements, which are then encompassed to strengthen its perceivable character by repetition. Meaning, the concept of ephemeral digital storytelling may not be present today if powerhouses like Instagram and TikTok did not repeat it through their platforms. Our behaviour in pattern recognition also supports the prevalence of the aesthetic of ephemeral digital storytelling because in order to “recognize” anything, neural networks need first to be taught what to recognize (Steyerl, 2018, p. 8). This allows us to recognize this type of aesthetic because we’ve already gathered the necessary information for classification, which enables us to ease into the use of similar features in other platforms. Our constant search for patterns is related to Shifman’s analysis of memes being the reflection of communication and social development within a person or group. One can argue that interfaces follow the cultural patterns of memes. According to Shifman, memes may best be understood as pieces of cultural information that pass along from person to person, but gradually scale into a shared social phenomenon” (Shifman, 2014, p. 15). This follows the same pattern of how interfaces transforms into a select aesthetic, which is then passed from platform to platform.
Shifman suggests that memes “shape the mindsets, forms of behaviour, and actions of social groups (Shifman, p. 15). This is relevant to Instagram Stories and Reels because such features had cultivated a type of digital culture, which has also translated into our lexicon as common knowledge. Van Dijck claims that promoting and branding the self has become normalized, accepted in ordinary people’s lives (Van Dijck, 2013, p. 203). We see this reflected onto Instagram’s interfaces because of the features’ purposes; creative expression and self-promotion. Just as how memes are able to shape one’s mind, it assists in shaping their online identities in order to gain popularity and potentially reach a comfortable level of recognition (Van Dijck, p. 203).
The repetition of this aesthetic transforms them into social norms based on our recognition. Just as how memes become social norms in a sense through “repackaging or imitation” for a period of time, they are often ephemeral as they are based on capturing a moment (Shifman, p. 30). This saturation is what makes it an aesthetic of the internet. On the contrary, Keeling addresses such structures through her project, “Queer OS”, which seeks to make queer into the logic of “an operating system of a larger order” that unsettles these social norms to create something more inclusive (Keeling, 2014, p. 154). She expresses the need of detachment from norm values.
Analyzing Instagram’s interface as a digital meme, enables us to get a sense of the sociocultural aspects that plays a role in its presence in today’s society. As these interfaces are driven by democracy, the aesthetic of the internet has only become more homogenous, as we see it repackaged through other existing platforms. Papacharissi points that “new technologies will adapt to the current political culture, instead of creating a new one” (Papacharissi, 2002, p. 21). As we have the power to pro-generate our social environments, it gives us the affordance to also shift it.
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