#instagramisdown

A friend of mine had a conversation with someone in a chat forum for 8 hours……. 8 HOURS! I have no idea what they were talking about, and I did not ask for sheer worry that I might still be there 8 hours later listening to the story. But what he did say was that he never thought he would be the kind of person to form a bond with someone he hardly knew over the internet. And yet we see this all the time.

Thanks to the emergence of social media and Mark Zuckerberg’s mission to “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together” (Chaykowski 2017), the way in which we communicate has changed. Some believe we have become disconnected from the real world and social media has made us go from a time of close bonds, sharing family recipes and cookbooks to uploading a picture of your apple pie to a mass audience on Instagram.

Instagram's online community is not the only space growing. Blogging is a growing space where people talk about food, art, film, sports and any subject that interests them and their audience. As a powerful communication tool with over 1 million blogs posted every 24 hours, bloggers are popping up everywhere with personal expression and a chance to describe their own experiences the main reason people start blogging (Cross 2011, pp. 37-40).

These communities see the digital world is shifting from ‘neighbourhood communities' to ‘communities' which consist of networked households and individuals. These online communities feel like home for many who submerge themselves into the world of social media. People are turning to social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook to socialise with peers and mark their identity known as ‘networked publics'.

The three central dynamics that shape networked publics and those interactions that take place are the invisible audiences, collapsed contexts and the blurring of public and private (boyd 2010, pp. 39-58)

These three central dynamics bring up various questions about how people communicate, and the affordances of social media. Unlike traditional methods of communication where you know who you are talking to and your message is subject to the audience, you are with. In this context when people post content online, they don't always know who is present or who they are sharing their story with and this is causing people to craft content for specific audiences. Some would say that this is lying about who you are and that people do not show their true self on social media. However, the affordance of social media “is the possibilities for action that it offers” (Graves 2007, p.336). The point is the affordance of social media is what it allows people to do and this affordance is certainly making us rethink the meaning of sociability, neighbourhood and community.

References

Boyd, d 2010, ‘Social Network Sites as Networked Publics’, in Papacharissi, Z, A Networked Self: Identity, Community, and Culture on Social Network Sites, Routledge, Hoboken, pp. 39-58.

Chaykowski, K 2017, Mark Zuckerberg: 2 Billion Users Means Facebook's 'Responsibility Is Expanding', viewed 5 December 2018, <https://www.forbes.com/sites/kathleenchaykowski/2017/06/27/facebook-officially-hits-2-billion-users/#5a6a30643708>.

Cross, M 2011, Bloggerati, twitterati, Praeger, Santa Barbara, Calif., pp. 37-40.

Graves, L 2007, ‘The Affordances of Blogging’, Journal of Communication Inquiry, vol. 31, no. 4, pp. 331-346, viewed 5 December 2018, <https://journals-sagepub-com.ezproxy.lib.swin.edu.au/doi/abs/10.1177/0196859907305446>.

INSTAGRAM IS DOWN just describe your food to me [IMAGE], Quickmeme 2018, viewed 5 December 2018, <http://www.quickmeme.com/meme/3pxlfe>.

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