Wrting 102
Professor: Margaret Kennedy
Changjian Wang (ID: 108412642)
10/4/2015
Pop Culture Artifacts: Instagram These days, smartphones can take unbelievable photos; in fact, they are able to capture our lives with all its minor details in an unbelievable quality, and every day they are getting only better. Due to this, now there exists a great number of photography apps one can download and install to make his photos look as if they were taken by a professional photographer. There are also mobile apps that allow sharing the photos you have taken with your friends. Instagram is one of those services that combine these two functions and enable users not only to take photos and videos and edit them but also share them on various social networks,…show more content… Today, Instagram is often compared to Facebook in terms of its influence on its users. In accordance with the Human-Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon, “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness and even depression (Winter). Instagram, in its turn, appears to be even more depressive as it “distills the most-crazy-making aspects of the Facebook experience” because photos are able to provoke social comparison (Winter). Apart from that, Instagram is one of the social networks which teems with selfies, the notion that worries many people a lot to such an extent that some of them do believe it is a mental disorder…show more content… This is not a surprise that millions of people use it on an everyday basis as Instagram is a perfect place for those who want to be in touch not only with their friends but with a great number of other people. Instagram gives its users an opportunity to express themselves, show their everyday life to others, share precious moments, and feel like professional photographers (due to its possibilities to edit and alter photos) or even celebrities. In addition to this, this service is free and user friendly, which makes it an almost perfect app for various segments of people. That is to say, everyone can find something that appeals personally to him / her. Of course, just as any other social networking service Instagram has its drawback as well. Its popularity, however, shows that its use has more advantages than disadvantages and that the number of users is going to increase in the nearest future.
Works Cited
Grohol, John. 'Taking Too Many Selfies? Don’T Worry, It’S Not A Disorder'. Psych Central.com. N.p., 2014. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.
Hu, Yuheng, Lydia Manikoda, and Subbarao Kambhampati. 'What We Instagram: A First Analysis Of Instagram Photo Content And User Types'. Eighth International AAAI Conference On Weblogs And Social Media. Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence, 2014. 595-598. Web. 2 Oct. 2015.
Instagram.com. 'FAQ • Instagram'. N.p., 2015.