My final Post on Instagram.
I joined Flickr in 2004 and used it pretty solidly until 2014, by that time Instagram had become a phenomenal success and was too big and important to ignore. I operated both accounts for quite a long time until I eventually stopped using Flickr completely.
Between 2014 and now Instagram has changed considerably. It used to be a photography platform, somewhere that you could share your work and get great feedback from other photographers, whether they were shooting on DSLRs, phone cameras or film. However, it’s success has consistently diluted that benefit and its purchase by Facebook has turned it from a photography app to the visual arm of Facebook. Adverts are now rife and it’s been labelled the worst platform for young people’s mental health.
I think it’s important to stress how damaging Instagram is, scoring highly in anxiety, depression, loneliness, sleep, bullying and ‘FoMo’ (Fear of Missing Out). The reason this is so important is that second to music, photography has become one of the most readily consumed art forms and something which 15 years ago only a portion of the population took part in. Now nearly everyone owns a camera and now regularly documents their life, especially young people.
I remember a friend getting a Nokia 6600 back in 2003 which was the first time I’d seen a camera phone and at the time it seemed relatively pointless, the quality was so low and the internet was so basic there were very little uses for it but then the iPhone came along and changed everything. Our relationship with photography morphed over the next 5-10 years, Photoshop went from relative obscurity (outside the design world) to a Verb. What started with Twitter connecting us to celebrities Instagram took to a whole new level and even created celebrities; the influencer was born because of Instagram.
Now I am not the kind of photographer who bemoans the rise of the cameraphone. I love technology and think that smartphone photography is as important as the invention of the Box Brownie camera 110 years earlier. It certainly had the same effect, putting technology in the hands of people who previously could not afford photography. Whilst professional photographers have clearly seen it as having an enormous effect on their businesses in terms of the art form, iphoneography *shudders at the term* will be remembered as a milestone in photography.
So now we have 3.5 billion people with cameras and a singular platform pretty much everyone uses it can no longer remain the platform it was. It’s a commercial and data mining behemoth for Facebook and what made it good when it was launched has now gone.
I haven’t really enjoyed using Instagram for a long time. It’s just been the way you post your images but with Facebook’s clear reluctance to change and continue to erode our society and democracy it’s just too much now. As they weave together Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp so they cannot be regulated and broken up I can no longer say to people ‘I don’t use Facebook’, Instagram is Facebook with a different mask on. After 2016, Cambridge Analytica and the recent highly successful film The Social Dilemma it’s no longer an option in my mind. What started with me leaving Facebook and changing all my site logins away from FB login, cancelling my Spotify because they wouldn’t let me disassociate my account with Facebook has now moved to now calling time on Instagram. Only Whatsapp remains.
So I’m going back to Flickr, now owned by SmugMug and in need of support, Flickr was one of the first largescale image sharing sites on the Internet and has survived being owned by Yahoo! which is more than be said for a lot of the startups they destroyed. They are transparent about what they do with your data, I pay for a professional account so I am no longer the product and it feels nice to go back to a photographers site. It’s like slipping back into an old jacket which might not be most stylish or even well made but it has personality and it works for me.
Hello again Flickr!
You can find me here: https://www.flickr.com/photos/spooke/