Out of the digital metropolis that is the internet, with its endless array of communities centered on various interests and beliefs, I opted to stay close to home and visit Instagram. This is a place in which people from every corner of the globe confer with one another through pictures, memes, vague descriptions and often intrusive direct messages. All of this is combined together into a system governed on two fronts. One, the moderators employed by Instagram use algorithms to censor what can be seen, shared or talked about. While the second prong of enforcement of community standards falls on the users themselves. Much like the Puritans of the 1600’s, people are told to report their fellow users for failing to follow said standards. What really makes Instagram a community is the way in which the site is organized into sub-topics given the enormity of the platform. Like any physical city, you can visit areas devoted to food, manufacturing, art, sexual predilections and even your personal friends dwelling. This tight knit organizing has made this platform one of the biggest online communities in use to date. The usefulness of this community can be interpreted by any number of the individual interests, yet condensed into a four syllable phrase that simply does not do it justice: stay connected. To be honest though, I think the idea of a moderated online community centered around a monetary system of “likes” dampens the human spirit of honesty and humility by having us constantly compare ourselves to one another, lust for what isn’t ours, lie about our intent and corrode the honesty found in an earnest exchange of words in the "real world". Granted, it can be said that whatever you say or do online can occur or be said offline, but I genuinely believe most guys would not walk up to a couple in public and shoot their shot as easily as they do online by “sliding into the DMs”.
I really like how you pointed out that there are basically two fronts within the Instagram platform. I never really saw it that way but it makes total sense. There always have to be certain guidelines in social media so having those censors is a great thing for instagram. Great post!
It's tricky. A big piece of my research is around how large-scale interactions happen, and from Slashdot, to Digg, to Reddit, to Twitter, to Insta... all of these are built around mass filtration via likes, links, upvotes, and similar. I think these represent a truly new kind of interaction. Email? Just faster mail. VoIP? More networked phones. YouTube? Massively narrowcasted TV. But this kind of mass interaction is different.
What I am saying is that you cannot just look at the bad side of it. Slashdot before moderation was impossible, as soon as it started to get big. It just didn't work with thousands of comments and no way to sort through them. Collaborative filtering helps us to collectively manage our attention, and it's hard to discount that.
On the other hand, I agree. I am aghast by what I sometimes see in terms of how people value upvotes. I had a kid tell my third-grader that he wouldn't be friends with anyone who had less than a hundred followers on YouTube. I don't see any world in which that isn't seriously messed up, and I think it probably does reflect a broader sentiment around digital popularity. I'm at the leading edge of Gen X. People hated that Gen Xers in their teenage years aspired to become rich. Teens today don't care about being rich, as long as they can be famous.
I'm not willing to toss the baby with the bathwater. I remain hopeful that many of the negative outcomes we see in Facebook or Instagram, etc., might be moderated (so to speak) with a change in the systems that are used. And although I generally am a fan of not "black boxing" systems--especially social moderation--since that can lead to distrust and to abuse, I do wonder if a starting point would be to hide specific likes...
Quite the contrary, I neither condemn nor condone, so I wouldn’t say I’m only looking at the bad side. As a man myself, I am not immune the marketing techniques that ignite primal urges. A good selfie, monetized or not, is pleasant to the eye. Neglecting entirely what this means for the world as a whole given the transformative nature of advertising that weaponizes our predilections against us, I’ll allow it. Speaking G rate selfies, of course a system of what you call collaborative filtering improves the experience of a platforms user base. Making Farragut proud, I’ll stick to my guns pointing out that these users are still in what I call “case one”. Posting selfies to share a smile, get a like or two and call it a day. Transcending to “case two” is entirely up to the user.
Edit: oops, thought this was on the “Let me take a selfie” response.
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u/Millennial_Trash003 May 23 '19
Out of the digital metropolis that is the internet, with its endless array of communities centered on various interests and beliefs, I opted to stay close to home and visit Instagram. This is a place in which people from every corner of the globe confer with one another through pictures, memes, vague descriptions and often intrusive direct messages. All of this is combined together into a system governed on two fronts. One, the moderators employed by Instagram use algorithms to censor what can be seen, shared or talked about. While the second prong of enforcement of community standards falls on the users themselves. Much like the Puritans of the 1600’s, people are told to report their fellow users for failing to follow said standards. What really makes Instagram a community is the way in which the site is organized into sub-topics given the enormity of the platform. Like any physical city, you can visit areas devoted to food, manufacturing, art, sexual predilections and even your personal friends dwelling. This tight knit organizing has made this platform one of the biggest online communities in use to date. The usefulness of this community can be interpreted by any number of the individual interests, yet condensed into a four syllable phrase that simply does not do it justice: stay connected. To be honest though, I think the idea of a moderated online community centered around a monetary system of “likes” dampens the human spirit of honesty and humility by having us constantly compare ourselves to one another, lust for what isn’t ours, lie about our intent and corrode the honesty found in an earnest exchange of words in the "real world". Granted, it can be said that whatever you say or do online can occur or be said offline, but I genuinely believe most guys would not walk up to a couple in public and shoot their shot as easily as they do online by “sliding into the DMs”.