#HowTheDevelopmentOfSocialNetworksHasChangedOurWayOfPerceivingImages

[eleonorapontiggia-blog]

How the development of social networks has changed our way of perceiving images

According to Internet live stats, more than 40% of the global population has access to the internet and the number of people worldwide who join the web, with a computer or a mobile phone, increases every second. As I write these sentences, more than 3.5 billion of users are actually connected. As a matter of fact, “There are officially more mobile devices than people in the world (7.2 billion gadgets) and they’re multiplying five times faster than we are”, states an article on The Independent (Davies Boren, 2014). The most revolutionary electronic device of all time is certainly the computer, but the one that transformed forever our way of living is the mobile phone. Especially after the presentation of the very first “smartphone”, the Apple’s iPhone, at the beginning of 2007, the way we think about technology and communication changed radically. We have been witnessed an exponential development of these accessories which are no longer just telephones, but they have become proper computers in miniature. If we think about it, they are something that complete ourselves as human beings by making our lives a lot easier: we can take photos and videos with they, we can take notes and make calculations, check our emails, the weather, the stock markets, we can navigate internet and use the maps to orient ourselves. Nowadays mobile phones have become and extension of our body, something that we can no longer live without.

As we assist to the development of these new technologies, industry experts also think about new ways of making use oh them. Apart from useful and helpful utillization of the means (like the examples mentioned above), a lot of “entertaining stuff” were invented in order to keep us more and more interested and engaged with the new gadgets on the market. Among the lots, there are the Social Media. By definition, social media is a “collective of online communication channels dedicated to community-based input, interaction, content-sharing and collaboration” (according to whats.com) (Rouse, date unknown). The first one that became famous worldwide was MySpace, launched by founders Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson in 2003; the website was a social network platform where people, once registered, could share their personal life and interests with their friends and the rest of the world. Behind this idea there were infrastructures of human resources, server capacity, finance and technical expertise that worked for the site; the idea was so catching and the profits so high that the following years way more social media emerged. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg, a university student, created, with the hep of few classmates, The Facebook, a social media which users intended to be restricted from those belonging to Harvard University. The basic structure and aim were similar to MySpace, with the difference that in a short amount of time it became the most popular website ever existed. These two social media, as many of the first ones, were concentrated on trying to connect people through live chats and exchanging of all sort of information, while websites focused only on images were still rare.

The revolution came alongside the development of Apple’s iPhones and its apps; the new mobile technology allows people to carry their social media accounts on their phones and so to have access to their personal profiles anytime, everywhere. As a matter of fact, a fully functioned new social media was born in the form of app only: Instagram. This social network was promoted in 2010 by its two founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger; it was born as a free mobile app only, focused on photo-sharing and soon it went viral. After several negotiations, in 2012 the brand was bought for US$1 billion by the Facebook owner which developed the app and dramatically increased the number of people registered in just two years. Some changes, of course, were made, such as the chance for users to directly connect their profile on Instagram to the one on Facebook and so the images shared in the first one would travel to the second more easily, making the connection between the two social media stronger than ever.

Currently, the Instagram icon is a white stylized symbol of a camera on a bright rainbow coloured background and the name was probably inspired by the old Kodak Instamatic of the 1960s: originally, in fact, the format of the pictures on Instagram was squared only, exactly like the one of the vintage camera and this was a very peculiar characteristic belonging to this singular app alone. The social media is quite simple to use (actually it is easier to practically use it rather then explain it in words): its main purpose is to upload images and short videos on to your personal profile, which you can modify at your convenience. The account page shows your username (which doesn’t necessarily have to be your real full name), the number of all the photographs you have upload (and a small copy of them as well), a profile picture, the number of followers and following people (which I will explain later in more details) and the chance to include your other personal website links and a small introduction. At the bottom page there are five different functions: your profile section, a list of notifications regarding likes and comments of you and people you follow, a camera switch to take pictures and videos directly from the app, a search button to find friends and have a look to other profiles that might interest you, and the Home page which shows a list of posts of users you follow. Last year, the Instagram Stories was introduced; it is basically an easier and more rapid way to share several moments of your life altogether with the web community. What makes this new function so appealing is that you can add captures directly on your photos, see how many people and who have looked at them, and that the whole thing will disappear forever after just one day (24 hours). This aspect was also criticized by many because of its evident similarity to another social media, Snapchat, which main purpose is to create a temporary story of images and chats that would disappear after 24 hours. Nevertheless, the upgrade resulted to be more than successful. On the other hand, to upload something definitive on Instagram is not that much difficult: you can do it directly from the app by pressing the small icon at the bottom centre, from the photo library on your phone, or even from other apps such as those designed to modify and correct images; once you have chosen a picture or a video, you can tag people and the place it was shot, correct it by adding filters (e.g. you can intensify the colours, transform it in to black and white, make the atmosphere more dream-like…), a small description and, more important, the hashtags. Instagram, alongside with Twitter, was the “supporter” of the hashtags; the term derives from the information technology industry whose experts often used the form of a word preceded by the hash symbol to highlight a special meaning in a text. In terms of the social network, the hashtags not only complete the significance of a photo, but they also allow other people to find your post by typing the same word in the search function of the app. Other people can comment, like and share your post with other users, or even report it if they consider the image somehow inappropriate, but they cannot save it in their phone. To start interacting with other contacts, you need to create your personal community of “followers”, that is that you want as many people as possible to follow your updates and keep up with your activity as an “instagrammer”; it is obvious that you also have to be a follower of someone in turn. To find people you just need to search them by their username or real name and the most interesting thing is that one can actually follow the activity of celebrities and famous people as well as regular friends. In this sense we are able to feed our curiosity and admiration towards those people that we only see on television and whose lifestyle we feel so distant and surreal.

Along with celebrities profiles, Instagram offers agencies and associations the possibility to create a business profile in order to get more attention from the public; scrolling our Home page, we can sometimes find sponsored posts from pages we don’t actually follow and their appearance is based on our general interests guessed by system on the base of the profiles we follow. Sometimes, even artists and self-taught workers use this web platform as their own personal portfolio, a more practical and visible way to show their pieces; furthermore, as a mean of communication, people often avail themselves of Instagram as a starting point for social trends to become viral, especially fashion trends. By and large, this social network provides its users a huge variety of possibilities and this is the reason why it gained an incredible popularity in such a short time.

It is known that there are several more female users on Instagram than male ones, this fact is maybe the consequence of the general feeling of vanity that wafts throughout this social media. Even though it is not explicit, it is clear that the main intent of people who register themselves on the app, is to get some attention from people around the world by documenting and showing their lifestyle. That’s the reason why the most popular uploads portray ordinary things such as selfies, house pets, places where people travel and even food they eat. By doing so, in a sense, we are trying to obtain others’ approbation and make them wish they were us. This idea was well perceived by the business agencies, which started to pay attention to what people looked at on the web and so, then, they decided to send some inputs through the networks in order to understand the general feeling about a product before making a proper campaign. In this way, people also get the chance of participating somehow to the process of merchandising what they would suppose to buy at a later time. In this sense, Instagram, and so social media more in general, have changed not only the way people live, but also the whole industry of commerce. In an article for The Guardian, Hanna Ellis Petersen declare that “Seen through the filter of Instagram, the world is a beautiful place…” (Ellis Petersen, 2014) and that’s exactly what advertisement aims to spread as propaganda. For this reason, agencies started to contact and “recruit” users with a large number of followers (at least few thousand of them), offering products and then even compensation in exchange of pictures that showed these people using the products. The campaign was such a success that this method increased consistently the fame of both the company and the “instagrammer”. Indeed, some people were even able to make a proper career out of their hobby of photo-sharing; these lucky ones are now called “influencers”. Since the large part of Instagram users are people under 35 year-old who use social media daily, brands decided to use the influencers to get to a younger audience and they immediately understood the advantage of this kind of publicity: paying the web star was far cheaper than hire expert models, stylists and photographers. As Jason Stain, member of Laundry Service Agency for the recruitment of famous instagrammers, points out, the forefront mechanism is advantageous not only for the industry finances, but also for the Instagram photographer who has the chance of taking control over his/her own image. The reason why these new celebrities get so much attention from the world, is because common people can easily relate with them; they started with nothing but a fresh catching idea. As a matter of fact, anyone could become a web star with the right approach: an example is the 20 year-old Charlie Barker, an ordinary English girl with an obsession for David Bowie and Hello Kitty. She is an art student who lives in a flat with room mates in the suburbs of London, just like any other student, and who started to post photographs of herself and her eccentric wardrobe on Instagram. Somehow, people started to appreciate her lifestyle and thanks to her 590,000 followers she was noticed by various fashion companies which hire Charlie as a model. Barker is neither rich or full of special talents, but this is the reason why people admire her so much, they feel close to her.

A whole new category of superstar was born thanks to social media, the “influencer”, as I cited before, and they soon became more important than athletes, actors and musicians. The most striking case is represented by the Italian fashion blogger Chiara Ferragni. She was born in a rather small town in north Italy in 1987 and she opened her blog The Blonde Salad in 2009, while she was studying law at Bocconi University in Milan; the web page included sections about fashion, makeup, travel and lifestyle in general. The years that followed allowed her to gain a popularity beyond belief, making her a worldwide phenomenon. She published a book and she launched a new brand on her name becoming not only a blogger, but also a designer and business woman. Thanks to her fame, she moved to Los Angeles where she received various honours: she was mentioned in Forbes list of “Under 30”, a Barbie version of herself was merchandise and she was subject of studies at the business course of Harvard University. Today, she is consider the most important influencer worldwide and she was able to build an empire based only on her image. Her activity on social media, especially on Instagram, is what keep people interested, in fact she reached an outstanding number of followers: 7.7 million. This number, however, is nothing compared to the 89.8 million of people following the queen of social media Kim Kardashian, who became popular thanks to the media attention on her personal life. She is the kind of celebrity who is famous just for being famous and, however, people are so interested in what she does that Time Magazine listed her among the top 100 most influential persons on the entire planet. Kim is now known to be the ambassadress of selfies, the most common type of upload that we can find on Instagram. The “selfie” has a long history behind that started from the first experiments with photography during nineteenth century and continued with the development of Polaroid camera during the 1960s and 1970s; nevertheless, the huge step forward came along with the invention of digital and especially with the promotion of the iPhone 4 in 2010 which included a front camera, perfect for taking selfies. This practice is often seen as a narcissistic performance, but it actually hide a variety of other significances: according to Miriam Hardey, it is a way of representing ourselves in the best way, but at the same time makes us vulnerable to the judgment of the others; Gail Dines states that nowadays women are objectifying themselves through the obsession of how they should look, without even being aware of that; Rebecca Brown, on the other hand, uses selfies as a sort of diary to explore herself (Day, 2013). There is no right or wrong in any of these opinions, what is evident is that social media put us in the centre of the universe, as the journalist Kate Loss suggests (Loss, 2013), and we love it, we almost need it.

The rapid development of the new means of communication has caused a major impact on contemporary life and the psychological implications that this condition arises, are palpable. Doctor Michael Sinclair, psychologist specialized in social media, affirms that human’s craving for validation and admiration comes from some survival instinct: the more an individual is liked, the better are the chances to live longer (Sinclair, 2013). Indeed, if we think about it, our profiles are full of beautiful images, we choose to show the world only what we want it to see about ourselves. Because of that, internet has become the ultimate refuge, a virtual place where we are free to be happy and in our best shape all the time. This is a topic very familiar to professor Kristen Howerton, who, during a conference, explains how human beings process and deal with pain: when we experience bad feelings, we tend to find a way to escape them instead of facing them. Diversions are positive and healthy if used only momentarily, the real issue is when those distractions become central for our wellbeing, become an addiction. We allow them to take charge and control on our lives suppressing our emotions; if we stop feeling the bad, soon we’ll stop feeling the good too (Howerton, 2013). What this expert points out is that these internet platforms, as powerful as they are, are not necessarily bad, one only needs to balance the way he or she interacts with them. How many times during the day we open Instagram (or any other app) just because we are bored? How many times we feel the need of recording an experience instead of actually living it, as if it wouldn't really happen otherwise? We always put our mobile phone between ourselves and the reality in front of us, thinking that in this way we have control over what happen around us. In this sense, the actual image is no longer the important thing, but the gesture is. The sensation of not being only spectators in an era characterised by events that we cannot control, gives people hope and a purpose in life. Social media have the power of making people feel involved and constantly in touch with that hyperreal world which we all dream about.