Instagram, an open digital storytelling platform for everyone
For me, Instagram is my favorite social media platform for digital storytelling. I use it for a long time to post photos, share video, and connect with the world. I like looking pictures and reading moments from The New York Times, National Geographic on my Instagram page.
This app is fabulous and awesome. It provides an equal opportunity to everyone to share photos and videos. Everyone could be a photographer and storyteller on Instagram. Much more, it also offers some simple tools for the user to edit their photos and video. In this aspect, it keeps convenience on the technology side. Meanwhile, when people post something on their Instagram pages, they can use some hashtags to find out others who are interested in the same topic. It helps users to meet and communicate with like-minded people.
On Instagram, I can see my friends’ interesting moments even though we are in different countries. Also, I can see a lot of impressive photos, which are posting from CNN, Bloomberg and other media companies.
Most of the time, I open my Instagram account and look at the photos and video on my page when I am waiting for the bus to back to school. Before I arrived at the classroom, I already know the most popular topics and enjoy a bunch of nice photos to refresh my morning. Besides, unlike YouTube, the videos on Instagram are shorter. It pushes people to introduce the major issue to the audience. Besides, the audience could get the information immediately from the videos on Instagram rather than watching a three minutes video to organize the story.
Compare to other social media platforms, Instagram is much easier to gather information. It does not have the 140 characters. It does not disappear after 24 hours, either.A lot of time when I look at the photos on Instagram, I can understand the background and the emotion immediately.
For my understanding, Instagram is a good example of the three-act structure story building. It drags the audience into the photos and videos directly and explains what happened during a short time period. It also takes the flat story and gives it an arc to appeal the audience to watch the short clip videos on their Instagram pages.
Instagram also has its own weakness. It does not have enough space for the users to upload the large size photos. Sometimes, the users have to cut the photos to fit into the photo size on their pages. Much more, unlike Snapchat could allow the users to add some funny Emoji integration to express their emotion. The Instagram users could not add the Emoji integration on their photos.
Generally, Instagram, as a social media platform, it is an open space for everyone to update their daily life by uploading photos and videos via their cell phones. I think that’s why Instagram is the best digital storytelling platform in these days.
