Instagram: An online diary in the form of pictures

MemeCentre. (2013). Instagram. Retrieved from http://www.memecenter.com/search/instagram

Instagram is a virtual network which was created in 2010. With rapid popularity, the app reached 100 million subscribers by 2012. It is used as a “quirky way to share your life with friends and allows you to experience moments in your friends’ lives though pictures as they happen (Instagram, 2016). It is a place where users are free to create their own identity in whichever way they please. They can choose to have their account to keep in touch with friends and their lives or they can run in anonymously following people based on the content they post.

The internet, however, isn’t a free space. It’s made into space by rules and conventions (Kuttainen, 2016). This is much the case with each individual Instagram account where the creator creates their account in their image run by their own rules.

According to Laurie McNeill, the “online diary” is one of the biggest things to come out of the 1990s (McNeill, 2016). Instagram is one of the more recent trends of an online diary where instead of writing out paragraph after paragraph, users communicate via pictures.

Reference List:

Instagram. (2016). FAQ. Retrieved from https://www.instagram.com/about/faq/

Kuttainen, Victoria. (2016). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, narratives and the making of place, Lecture 3: Space and Identity: Genre and Transformation. [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu.jcu.edu.au

McNeill, L. (2016). Diary 2.0? A Genre Moves from Page to Screen. Language and New Media. (pp. 313-335). Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, INC.