The Narrative of Instagram
Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words.
And the social network built around these images is worth a billion dollars.
One may find hard to believe that a website dedicated to pictures of cats, food and hipster clothing could be worth a billion dollars when these clothes are second-hand. The truth is there’s a real sense of appeal in Instagram and the way it develops stories within a single frame.
I’ll try to write about the most successful/particular social networks and the formula of their success regarding narrative as part of the concoction. To start with we’ll tackle a very colorful case as it is Instagram.
Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, and its tagline is “Instagram is a fast, beautiful and fun way to share your life with friends and family”. Yet that’s something you can do ever since there’s been Internet around your house. So what makes Instagram great?
For now we focus in one thing: filters. Because what Instagram does best is that in a simple and straightforward way it delivers an analogical experience in photography through a digital media. People think they’re not only taking a picture, they’re making a picture.
Back in the day there were cats and second-hand rags but there weren’t a billion dollar worth of people giving a crap about them, only analog photography. This type of photography consists of using chemical processes to create a phisical copy of an image. After a while the chemicals deteriorate and the pictures color range changes. Thus, the picture looks different as time goes by. Also the technology has shifted and evoled throughout the years, so different decades have been preserved with differently, and the popular cultura associates this color range.
This is a famous image of the execution of Nguyen Van Lem. It’s not your daily selfie to Instagram, but this image has been subject to debates over 1000 words long and more. If I were to ask you when did this happen you’d never say “is that Jackie Chan?!”. This is a black and white picture with lots of grain, by the clothing and architecture you can tell it belongs to a different time, and so on. That, and a man is being killed. It’s a powerful image. Now let’s look at the same image in color.
There’s more noise, less drama. It’s different, there are different words within this frame. Still over thousand. In short, Instagram pretty much does this. It changes the words within our pictures. Simple things as knitted sweaters and cats are somewhat enhanced. There’s the idea of craftmanship behind these pictures, the passage of time and a link between the past decades and generations we sometimes desperately hang onto just because we understand that the more time goes by, the more we leave these times behind us.
Not only nostalgia powers Instagram, most of their users probably never had an analogical camera. So there’s also a hint of time travel when using Instagram in its purest form. It can help you bring aesthetics into the mix without having the knowledge or time to properly retouch your photos.
One of my favorite Instagram users is tlampo who is not even a photographer, but an Apple developer. And that’s the true reach of this application. We get to take a picture of something, extend it beyond what we captured and share it under equal conditions with our loved ones and the rest of the world.
Instagram unique narrative is not about cats, sweaters and coffee, but the ability of creating a unique perspective out of everyday things (that, and you can follow some hot chicks).
Originally published at www.invisiblebridg.es.
