According to recent researches[1], people has spent more time in Facebook than ever, which means about 1.79 billion active users worldwide. Asking my students about their favorite social media website, however, most of them answered Instagram.
Instagram is the most popular among teenagers[2] because the communication through images is faster, more focused and aimed to a specific situation, they usually do not read the message inserted in the feed and do not stand for more than 5 seconds each post, so that way, they get as much informed as possible in a short period of time. The problem is that they spent almost all day long between posting and observing other’s posts. But why Instagram?
Instagram, commonly known as ‘Insta’, is a social network media launched for the first time in 2010 and it allows users to upload photographs or up to one-minute videos that can be edited changing their basic colors (filters) and organized by hashtags and geographical tagging[3]. According to Kress[4], “representation focuses on my interest; communication focuses on the assumed interest of the recipient of the sign”, and that explains why Instagram is so popular among teenagers. In an easy and fast way, they share photos based on their daily routine, leisure activities and memes.
Memes have become the utmost way of communicating ideas and sharing same opinions with a click on their cellphones. As Kress explains, “my sign needs to be shaped for the person or group for whom I have intended it to be a sign. That leads to the demand for transparency in communication”. Who hasn’t ever shared a meme? It could be about politics, a famous person, or just a joke represented in a cartoon with no words at all.
[1] Faculty of Journalism and Mass Communication, Thammasat University, Pathumthani 121121, Thailand in https://doi.org/10.1016/j.kjss.2017.02.001 [2] Based on my personal research among 39 of my students from K6 to K12. [3] According to Wikipedia in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Instagram [4] Kress, Gunther. Multimodality: A Social Semiotic Approach to Contemporary Communcation. London: Routledge, 2009, pp. 70-71, 133-134, 6.
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