Cybercultures/Social Media/Instagram

Instagram

Instagram is a photo-sharing, social media app which was launched on 6th October, 2010. It was started by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger and was bought by Facebook 18 months later for one billion dollars. With regard to Cybercultures, Instagram has become a global cultural phenomenon, one which has taken an essential seat of discourse and activism.

Demographics and User Statistics

• Instagram has a total of 700 million users
• Around 95 million pictures are uploaded every single day
• 17% of teens across the globe believe Instagram is the most important social media
• There are 25 million business profiles on Instagram

• In India, as of 2019, there are 155,430,000 users, with 87.2% identifying as males

Instagram and activism

Social media has diffused the ideas of self and public today, to an unprecedented degree. Unity of time, space and action has been perpetually distorted. . Amidst the Ukrainian revolution of 2014, Sadof writes how Instagram was not only an essential tool for the diverse advocates of democracy but also key in democratising virtual space, rendering users at the helm of first person journalism. Research in Australia is yet more compelling. A recent trend of Instagrammers capturing myriad urban banalities perhaps reeks of more than just quirky hobbies. Hicks propounds this newfound obsession of many Australians as a unique private activism, a mediated uncanny to revoke a keen sense of nostalgia.  Not so long ago, Vice covered a cogent story of activism on Instagram. It argued that the virtue and power of imagery “against a gigantic block of text” cannot go unnoticed. Instagram is the free bastion of the individual, not a brand, empowering movements and ideas across boundaries.

Reference List

• Arnett, George. "Visualising the Ukrainian Revolution Using Instagram". The Guardian, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2014/oct/08/visualising-the-ukrainian-revolution-using-instagram. Accessed 12 Aug 2019.
• Bruns, Axel. (2008). The Future Is User-Led: The Path towards Widespread Produsage. Fibreculture Journal. 11.
• Hicks, Megan. “Strange in the Suburbs: Reading Instagram Images for Responses to Change.” Visualizing the Street: New Practices of Documenting, Navigating and Imagining the City, edited by Pedram Dibazar and Judith Naeff, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2019, pp. 57–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv9hvqjh.6.
• Meadowcroft, Micah. “The Distance Between Us.” The New Atlantis, no. 58, 2019, pp. 74–79. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/26609120.
• O'Donoghue, Caroline. "How Hashtags Are Changing the World". Glamour, 2017, https://www.glamourmagazine.co.uk/article/activism-on-instagram. Accessed 12 Aug 2019.
• Rose, Devorah. "Trendy Social Activists Prove Instagram Is a Platform for More Than Selfies". Vice, 2017, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/padwxn/trendy-social-activists-prove-instagram-is-a-platform-for-more-than-selfies. Accessed 12 Aug 2019.
• Sadof, Karly Domb. “Finding a Visual Voice: The #Euromaidan Impact on Ukrainian Instagram Users.” Digital Environments: Ethnographic Perspectives Across Global Online and Offline Spaces, edited by Urte Undine Frömming et al., Transcript Verlag, Bielefeld, 2017, pp. 239–250. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv1xxrxw.19.
• Victor, Daniel. "How Instagram Rose Into a Cultural Powerhouse". The New York Times, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/25/technology/instagram-celebrities-cultural-powerhouse.html. Accessed 12 Aug 2019.