Instagram is a great social media app and a source of a digital narrative. Instagram is first and foremost an app to share your photos with the world, friends, and family. Instagram has everything that the modern app has or needs. Instagram became one of my favorite social media apps for that reason. It allows you to share pictures with friends and family, it tells you a story about people’s lives and your own, and you can go live to be connected with people in real time. But when you look at Instagram as a whole everything on it tells a unique story.
Instagram has become the most popular photo sharing app out there. In a report from Social Sprout, written by Chloe West, Instagram has 1 billion active monthly users. Of the 1 billion active users, 50% of them are actively scrolling through their feed on a daily basis. If you wanted to you could get your pictures and videos out to a scientifically large audience. Many people have done just that. Every day we see influencers pop up on our feeds. These people have gained a mass amount of followers on this platform, and others, to share their pictures and videos. In another article “Instagram by the numbers: stats and demographics & fun facts” by Omnicore. They say that 100 million plus pictures and videos are uploaded to Instagram every day. The sheer amount of photos post to Instagram is staggering. With 500 million daily users this doesn’t really surprise me. Everyone wants to show the world what they can do with a camera or just show off their life, and Instagram’s platform allows for that. For someone like me, I have two accounts. I have a personal account and a business account. I use my business account for posting my pictures from photo shoots, pictures and videos I’ve been paid to make, and my videos from my summer internship.
If you have ever clicked on someone’s page you know that you can see every picture they posted. And if you take the time to go through each picture you could learn something new about them. I took some time to go through and reflect on my own Instagram page. I made my first Instagram post on May 24th, 2012. Since that day I have posted 103 more pictures and have gained a substantial amount of followers. The least amount of likes I got was on my first picture and that got 8 likes and my most liked picture got 385 likes (probably because I had a puppy in it). But the one thing that I liked about going back through all these pictures, which I haven’t done in a long time, was seeing myself as a younger kid again. I had pictures of my childhood friends and my parents when they were younger. You get to see yourself progress through adolescents into your current self. I could do the same for each one of my friends. I know that they all got Instagram around the same time as I did, so I could go all the way back to their first pictures and get a similar story to mine. But at the same time I could just meet someone and they decide to follow you back on Instagram. You could also go look through their pictures to get a better sense of who they are and what they like. Going to my business account this was cool to look at also. Going through that showed all the locations that I’ve been for each picture and video. You can even pull up a map with all the pictures locations on it. This tells the a very unique story about everywhere you have gone. For me this was cool to look at because my map was very spread out. I had pictures and videos post from Chicago IL, Columbia MO, Naples FL, Indianapolis IN and a lot of other places. I’ve been all over traveling for work, and that map can show that.
For the people that are familiar with Instagram you know the term “going live” and you probably hear it a lot. For those who don’t know what it means, basically you are live streaming yourself through your phone. Any one of your friends can hop on and watch you while you are live. Most people who go live are trying to get the word out about something they care about, show you what they are doing in real time. In the article by Chloe West she stats that around 100 million people are either watch people go live or they are going live themselves. This is a large number of people watching other people and influencers or someone going live for the people. Just like posting a picture, going live is a great way to get your art, talents, and thoughts out there for the world to see.
Instagram has a wide variety of narratives that you could choose from to look at. Everything on Instagram tells you a story you just have to look. Every story is a unique story to someone. There are stories in every picture that is posted, every profile page, and every live stream.
