Touring With Instagaze

Instagram has become a very important part of our lives. Scrolling through Instagram
is the first and the last thing that I do every day. I think that it is a great platform to
meet people, stay connected to your friends and a really good opportunity for
content creators, artists and designers to showcase their work. There are so many
people like bloggers or influencers whose major source of income is through
Instagram. They have a public identity because of Instagram. I, too, have a blogger
account on Instagram and it has given me a lot of opportunities to explore what I am
interested in and meet people with the same interests. It also paved the way for me
to collaborate with various other experts in the same field. It’s a great source of
worldwide information too. It gives its users the power to seek for support and voice
their opinions. The online markets are moving from their websites to social media
due to the presence of active audience on platforms like Instagram.
But as we know, everything comes with a price. Instagram has changed our lives
drastically. It has deformed the concept of privacy to some extent. People upload
their minute to minute life updates as stories, they troll each other, cyber bullying
also got a new platform to do its job. People send inappropriate messages to each
other which in some cases turns offensive. People have been blinded with this social
media world that they mindlessly follow whatever trend going on then. It also affects
your mental health in some ways. It provokes the feeling of inferiority, you feel more
insecure if you don’t get enough likes or comments. In some cases, it also reinforces
the state of depression in some people like comparing your life to other’s Instagram
life which need not necessarily be the way they portray it. People also use it to
spread fake news and create unnecessary tension amongst the targeted audience.
Nevertheless, Instagram of course helps you look at the world through different
lenses. It filters the world as the fellow Instagrammer wants it to be and gives you a
whole new perspective on it like the sunset picture we saw in the class. We use
Instagram daily but we don’t realize why we do it or why do we like a certain picture,
what’s the motive behind it. After attending the first class, I started thinking before
liking a certain picture. One of the reason is the person who is posting it, a friend, an
idol etc. If the picture is uploaded by some random page, I like it only if I like the
content or if I could relate to it. So throughout this course, I expect to explore the
various possibilities that Instagram has and answer as to why we are so addicted to
social media.