Instagram. Tama Leaver
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groups on Instagram is the focus of chapter 5. Rather than there being a singular understanding and use of Instagram, many different approaches, understandings and vernaculars are visible in the way different groups use the platform. Instagram is best understood in terms of the multiplicity of cultures that are not delimited by specific demographic categories. Young people in different regions are particularly likely to develop their own, specific, often niche uses, which often include shorthands and norms not easily understood by others. Politicians across the globe are turning to Instagram to engage with their citizens, sharing their thoughts and lives, with notable examples such as Singapore’s Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, and US Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Cultural diversity is also visible in the way that cultural, social and domestic spaces and institutions are responding to Instagram. Instagramspecific museums and galleries are emerging where every space is a perfect selfie opportunity, while traditional galleries and museums are carefully crafting opportunities for visual interaction even amongst traditional art. Restaurants, cafés and bars are ensuring they are Insta-worthy, from the design of food and drinks to art and ambience design. Even homes are now being built with the angles and aesthetics crafted to allow ideal Instagram impact every day.
Chapter 6 examines the impact of Instagram over the entire lifespan, from birth to death. While Instagram’s Terms of Use prevent anyone under 13 years of age using the platform, Instagram is nevertheless filled with children. Even before birth, the sharing of ultrasound photos to announce a pregnancy is a normalized social ritual. The debates around sharenting illustrate that the question is not whether to share images of children, but when and how often. Parental and child influencers diversify the representations and discussions of parenting and childhood online, but when advertising and sponsorship are involved, they raise difficult questions about the line between representation and exploitation of children. At the other end of life, mourning and selfies at funerals shows that Instagram has opened up new spaces for grieving and celebrating life and, despite moral panics in the press to the contrary, these practices respect and cherish the dead. This chapter also examines the cold reality of what happens to someone’s Instagram data after they die. Ultimately, this chapter argues that all Instagram users co-create each other, and in the case of children and the deceased, it is very clear how Instagram users are representing and telling the stories of other people in the posts, comments and Stories they share.
Our final chapter pulls all of the threads together, examining the cumulative impact of the platform: from the Everything of Instagram, to the Instagram of Everything. We look at the materialization of Instagram in everything from stickers and posters to Instagram-themed cameras and bespoke app integration in new phones. We examine the impact of Instagram on popular culture more broadly, and interrogate the phenomenon of virtual Influencers, digital amalgams of design, storytelling, communication and art who command large Instagram audiences but do not exist in the material world beyond the platform. We argue that Instagram use has shifted from a focus on filters, to an era of templatability, where new aesthetic and communication norms are established by celebrities and Influencers that ripple through the platform, establishing the fleeting vernacular norms of the day. We conclude, dabbling in alliteration, and suggest a framework of eight ‘A’s to understand the future of Instagram: affordances and algorithms; aesthetics and affect; attention and audiences; and agency and activism.
Over to You: Instagram the Instagram Book!
Now that you’re reading this book, we have a request: we’d love to know where you’re reading and what you think of the book. We would enjoy hearing your reactions, questions, thoughts, constructive criticism or even suggestions for future additions if there’s enough interest to one day do a second edition of Instagram: Visual Social Media Cultures. The most obvious way to share with us, as you might imagine, is to take a photo on Instagram and use the hashtag #polityinstabook, or tag us at @polityinstabook, or if you’d like to send us a message directly, either use the Direct Message function, or tag us in Stories. If you’d like to follow the book’s account on Instagram you are more than welcome; we aim to repost some of the places people are reading, and the thoughts they share with us amongst other Instagram-related material. To follow us on Instagram, you can also just scan our nametag in the image below (figure i.1). We’re on Twitter as well (also @polityinstabook) if you would like to follow us there, where we’ll be tweeting and retweeting news about Instagram.
Figure i.1. Instagram nametag for @polityinstabook
CHAPTER ONE Platform
In this first chapter, we explore the emergence and history of Instagram as an app and, quite quickly, a platform. While the term platform is a loaded one (Gillespie 2010), the use of the term here is specifically to draw attention to the fact that Instagram is more than one thing: it is an app; it is a series of programs and algorithms; it is a gigantic database of images, videos, captions, comments, geolocative tags, location tags, likes, emoji and more and more items over time; it is a collection of personal data (connected with similar sets of personal data after the purchase by Facebook); it is an application program interface (API) which enacts rules to allow different apps, platforms and partners to access, add or remove data from the Instagram database; it is a series of decisions and developments over time that create different versions of each of these things; and it also encapsulates various popular understandings of what Instagram ‘is’ to the more than a billion people who use it. In short, describing Instagram as a platform offers a continual reminder that Instagram is many different things, some at the same time, and some that have quite radically changed over time.
Similarly, in discussing the politics of Instagram, we are not talking about the political influence of the platform (although that is important, and explored near the end of this chapter), but rather we are highlighting the importance of specific decisions and changes which have made Instagram what it is today. While we’re outlining some of the major events and decisions that have shaped Instagram, this chapter is by no means exclusive; for a more robust change-by-change outline of Instagram, see the Appendix which offers a chronology of Instagram’s various versions and alterations. In this chapter, we are focusing on a few of the bigger changes and moments that have shaped the platform, and use these to situate the platform, and the company, in a broader context. In exploring Instagram, we are always mindful of the broader visual social media landscape of which Instagram is a part, but hope that this exploration of Instagram illuminates more about this broader context as well.
From Burbn to Instagram
Instagram founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger initially began working together on an app in 2010, but it was not focused on photography at all. Rather, inspired by the emergence of location-based check-in apps, the pair were developing a Foursquare competitor, a check-in app called Burbn, based on locating and sharing details of the best bourbon locations. After realizing their app was unlikely to compete with a glut of locative media apps, the two completely stripped their work back to photos, comments and likes with an optional check-in (Swisher 2013).
After experimenting with a number of designs and names, the two settled on Instagram. As Systrom (2011) recalls, they ‘renamed because we felt it better captured what you were doing – an instant telegram of sorts. It also sounded camera-y.’ While Instagram is well known as an app which changed photography, it’s worth remembering that the immediacy of ‘instant’ was the most important thing at the beginning. The communication that photography allowed, rather than fidelity to the photographic form, is at the very root of the platform’s success. When the app began testing in July 2010,