Through the eyes of Instagram
The well-known Instagram phenomenon, who doesn’t know the social media application? I get up in the morning with it myself and go to bed with it. Or scroll through all the photos during your work break, sounds that familiar? It is also a bit of a pastime nowadays, so many photos are posted that you don’t even get to see all the photos of everyone you follow. Nowadays it is used for all purposes, in the past it was mainly a tool for placing photos. It was an easier way than posting photos on Facebook. But in 2019 it has grown into a complete world of marketing, advertising, promotion, announcing and broadcasting. How did it get such a big role in society in such a short time?
*PING*, a message on your mobile from Instagram. You have received a like from someone in your photo. We literally pick up our mobile phone for one like we got, at school or work or any other place. You have the option to get Instagram message notifications from even one like, it should not get crazier right? What makes Instagram a good concept these days is all the functions that the app has developed. You have the hashtags, you can take photos via Instagram, with necessary filters. Furthermore, the biggest and best adaptation has been “adding a location to the picture”. This has made a big difference for Instagram. Since then, the focus has gone from just “posting photos” to “posting photos in specific places”. I can know everything about it because I am also indebted to it. I was in Barcelona in May this year, and I posted this photo on Instagram at the Arc the Triomphe. An iconic place in Barcelona to take a photo, so that everyone can see in a glance where you are at.
Professor Gillian Rose with his article: Visual Culture, Photography, and the Urban: An Interpretive Framework provides a good insight into the visual image of the city. He explains the understanding and reflecting on the various ways that urban scholars have worked with visual representations of city spaces. He says that there are 3 main approaches, namely: representing the urban, evoking the urban and performing the urban.
Two quotes of the article: “It focusses on one visual medium: photography. Photography is a useful medium through which to explore ways of conceptualizing relations between the urban and visual media because it has from its inception been used to picture cities; it is also a very widely distributed technology, used in a vast range of contexts by diverse kinds of users.” [1] You see how the photography phenomenon has changed over the years. At first, it was mainly to have photographic material from certain places. Now it is completely enlarged and is not just about the covenant of photography. Photography of urban places is nowadays much about city marketing.
And this one: “Photography in particular has been used in many different ways in relation to the city. Some of the earliest photographic work showing city places appears highly descriptive: photography as technology has very often been used as a means of objectively recording visual appearances. “[1]
The technology of the photography profession goes further than ever. It is used for all purposes, on Instagram photos are also placed in all ways about cities, countries or specific places. Thanks to location tagging on Instagram it has mainly changed. In this way, there is a super large audience and you can promote or practice marketing in many different ways.
But there is one downside to this story, everything you post on social media will remain in the cloud forever. Almost everyone can see what you have posted, and the data can be retrieved many years later. ON BROADWAY cleverly responded to this. A group of people has collected all the data from photos posted on Broadway in New York. The video “represents life in the 21st-century city through a compilation of images and data collected along the 13 miles of Broadway that span Manhattan.” [2] What they have made from this is a new type of city view, what has been created and gathered through the activities or hundreds or thousands of people.
The third article is: The age of surveillance capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff. A quote from the article: “This is about surveillance capitalism, nowadays everything is monitored. And what is crucially different about this new form of exploitation and exceptionalism is that beyond merely strip-mining our intimate inner lives, it seeks to shape, direct and control them. Their operations transpose the total control over production pioneered by industrial capitalism to every aspect of everyday life. “[3]
It goes so far that everything we do is seen and recorded daily. Is that good or do you think that too much privacy is being removed? My advice to you, watch out by what you do on the internet!
The fourth article that is interesting about this topic is: Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media by Nadav Hochman and Lev Manovich. Very interesting article about the influence of Instagram on cities. “While Instagram eliminates static timestamps, its interface strongly emphasizes physical place and users’ locations. The application gives a user the option to publicly share a photo’s location in two ways. Users can tag a photo to a specific venue, and then view all other photos that were taken and tagged there. If users do not choose to tag a photo to a venue, they can publically share their photos’ location information on a personal “photo–map”, displaying all photos on a zoomable world map.”[4]
I personally think this is the best thing about adding the location on Instagram and is the most central to me as ‘city marketing’. Because in this way from one tagged place all data from photos and videos come together. At that moment you can see to what extent numbers are used. It has a lot of positive influence on city marketing.
I am going on vacation to Egypt soon, and I was in doubt between 2 hotels. So, what do I do then, I go to Instagram locations and look for both hotels and look at the pictures of people who have posted with that location on Instagram. This way you can see how the hotel looks on ‘non-professional photos’, and that way I can make my choice easier. I can recommend this to everyone. Well … if I’ve been on vacation you can also find my photos among the location-tagged photos of the hotel. Like this one on the left ;).
Now I have written a post about Instagram for the second time and I am really surprised how much can be said about an app on your phone. That actually could have become from something that small and unimportant to something so big. And that actually becomes from a side issue in daily life, a much more important part in everyone’s daily life. So much data is posted every day that you can hardly believe it. But remember well, always be careful with what you post.
[1] Gillian Rose, ‘METHODOLOGY OPEN ACCESS Visual Culture, Photography and the Urban: An Interpretive Framework’, Special Methodology Edition plus Miscellaneous, Space and Culture, 2014.
[2] Goddemeyer, D. (n.d.). ON BROADWAY. Retrieved June 8, 2019, from http://on-broadway.nyc
[3] Zuboff, S. (n.d.). The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Retrieved June 8, 2019, from https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/feb/02/age-of-surveillance-capitalism-shoshana-zuboff-review
[4] Hochman, N. (2013, June 17). Zooming into an Instagram City: Reading the local through social media | Hochman | First Monday. Retrieved June 8, 2019, from https://firstmonday.org/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/4711/3698
