Here's a question for you: do you use Instagram? If the answer is yes, and particularly if you are a photographer or artist, what do you use it for? Has it brought you any benefits, beyond attracting the occasional "like" or "nice pic!" comment? I'd be interested to hear.
I ask because people have sometimes asked me, "Are you on Instagram?", but, now that I have finally got around to looking into it, it seems like an essentially ephemeral platform. Crucially, it is also entirely phone-based. I was amazed to discover that, officially, you can only upload image files to it from your phone. True, it can be gamed by using 3rd-party apps or by exploiting various cunning back-door ways in, but in spirit it's a phone-only app. Worse, it can't be downloaded in its current incarnation onto my antique iPhone 4s.
Why have I finally got around to looking at something that others have been using for years, and which is probably already past its peak? Well, clearly, I put a lot of work into this blog, and have recently updated my website, but the audience for all this effort – both visual and written – remains very small: I'd estimate that I have around fifty regular readers, a number which has remained constant for years now. It doesn't do to get grandiose about the size of readership one might expect to accumulate, but I hope you'd agree that this is good stuff that deserves an audience in three figures, at least! I suspect part of the problem is that I lack a presence in the social media world – for whatever reason [1], it seems none of my blog posts ever gets linked to Twitter or Facebook, which is not something I can have any influence over – so I'm in a Muhammad-mountain situation.
So I would be willing to duplicate some of the effort that goes into this blog on another platform like Instagram to attract a bigger audience, but only if that audience was likely to do more than glimpse at a phone-sized image, click a "like" button, and move on. Who needs that kind of attention? Which probably means, who needs Instagram?
1. TBH I expect that my fifty loyal readers are rather like me, and have no presence on either Twitter or Facebook.
16 comments:
I was on Instagram for a bit but am off it now. Didn't do me any good really. I used to follow a few 'real' photographers on there and it was mildly enjoyable to see their new pictures. But I grew tired of posting my own pictures only to get little or no response, and if you're not looking for some sort of response, what's the point of posting them? (I can get my fix of little to no response on my own blog if I need that…)
It's really for people who take pictures with their phone, isn't it? Come to think of it, I might get an account ...
Zouk,
Yes, I think the crux is in your "really". It seems many serious artists of various sorts do run Instagram operations -- I'm not yet sure why or to what end -- but I'm pretty sure it's "really" about air-heads putting up videos of themselves, which can be monetised by becoming an "influencer" with a vast audience. Apparently there's a phenomenon called "dropshipping" which earns these people shedloads of money for endorsing things like Chinese knockoff airPods which they have never actually seen or used.
Mike
I don't have an account on any social media platform, neither Instagram nor Facebook, Twitter et al.. My medium is the photographic series in combination with text, and Instagram isn't a suitable platform for this. Furthermore, the point in social media is frequent content updates (at least daily) to keep the followers interested. My projects, on the other hand, often run over years, so I don't put new work on my website that often. I don't think that my work would draw a big audience even if I were on social media, anyway. But it's what I always wanted to do, so I just carry on.
Best, Thomas
There's only 50 of us, but our strength is as the strength of 5000, because our hearts are pure.
Pure hearts, alas, have no cash value.
I do have an instagram account, which I don't use, and I absolutely have no idea what the hell the point of instagram is. I poke at it now and then, and Serious People use it, and I have no idea what the hell they are on about.
It's a mystery, though if I could make thousands a day endorsing snide goods from China it might start to make sense...
Meanwhile, stay pure, and remain in light: "First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin!"
Mike
Well, my school motto was Beati Mundo Corde, though I doubt that I've lived up to it (I certainly haven't seen God yet). My son runs a team that produces one of the BBC's websites and he tells me that the demographic into which I (and, I suspect, many of your regular readers) fall is of no interest to those shaping the technology of cultural communication now. Given my deteriorating eyesight and haptic clumsiness, photographs on phones doesn't work for me.
old_bloke,
Lancing College? I often admired that gothic Potter-ish pile on a hill when driving to visit my daughter in Brighton.
They ignore us at their peril!
Mike
No, not that posh - though I recently found out that my wife's great uncle was groundsman for the playing fields at Oundle . . .
old_bloke,
No problem, we allow all sorts in here!
I've learned something today, though: that "mundus" as a noun means "world", which I knew, but that "mundus" as an adjective means "pure, clean, neat, elegant", which I didn't.
Mike
Learning Latin through a reading photography blog - if someone would have told me that 15 years ago, I might have shied away...
Insta (yes, young (German) people in the know like my daughter never say Instagram, just Insta) is for youngsters, wannabe influencers (the word to me is a mis-spelling, should be influenzas)... but at least some photographers use and even monetize it. It certainly endorses a special kind of composition adequate to the small phone screen, and of course everything you push there gets 0.2s of attention if it's not the picture of a cat.
So I don't want to invest too much energy there (I rarely bother to open the app on my phone), but I've pondered the idea to set up an automatic push from my blog to Instagram, so I could use that channel without any additional work involved.
Markus,
I like "influenzas"!
Mike
Bunch of cranky old (probably) white men.
Where's the end of the line? Over there? Let me join you, sirs.
Kent,
You're very welcome, though I'm not at all sure where we're going...
Mike
Thank you, Sir, for taking the lid off Instagram so we, the readers, could get a look at what's cooking therein without having to burn our hands. I have been urged, often by serious photographers, to Join. I'm glad I haven't. After reading your findings, it's No, Thank You, Instagram.
Great reading, your blog.
Thank you.
Pritam
Thanks, Pritam, although I haven't so much lifted the lid as taken a cautious sniff and backed away... I think the comments here are probably more useful, in that regard, than the post!
Mike
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