An Autobiography Via Instagram


A day in the life of an Instagram user
https://backchannel.com/war-stories-3696d00207ff#.ccjd66yis

Pictures can also be used to tell a narrative and where better to read about someone's life than through pictures than Instagram. There are two types of people on Instagram. There are those that give their followers a day-by-day autobiography where they post every hour on the hour to let people know where they are and what they are doing. They would rather give people a play-by-play, rather than keep them guessing. The other type of Instagram user is the one that keeps the mystery. They only show you the interesting parts of their story, like when they spontaneously go on holidays or when they meet up with their friends for a night out.

This video is an example of how people use Instagram to slowly write their own autobiographies. However, rather than just a "day in the life" they show this day over and over again. Anyone is able to go through their Instagram and trace it back to any day of the year and see what they did, who they saw and most importantly what they ate that day. Victoria (2016) states that through art we have "endless opportunities to explore history, culture, math and science." As images are a form of art, there are those that would argue that much like the the Aboriginals are "thought to have scattered a trail of words and musical notes along the line of their footprints" (Chatwin, 1987) they are scattering their own words with a trail of pictures and short 60 second videos.

References
Chatwin, B (1987). The Songlines. London, Great Britain: The Spartan Press Ltd.

Kuttainen, V. (2016). BA1002: Our space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, lecture 5: Stories of place: Story lines . [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au