A global album

Eas­ier and sim­pler

The breadth of In­sta­gram has now been cap­tured in a book pub­lished by Plan­eta Fan­books. We In­sta­gram is a vi­sual overview of the net­work or­gan­ised into themes by Marta Alonso, who says she came across the app by ac­ci­dent, “down­load­ing it some five days after it was re­leased”. Alonso works in the world of media and mar­ket­ing, and has ad­vised busi­nesses and in­sti­tu­tions, such Vuel­ing, FC Barcelona, the Agència Cata­lana de Tur­isme and the Grup Damm.

Per­haps it was her pro­fes­sional ex­pe­ri­ence that al­lowed her to see the po­ten­tial of In­sta­gram: “It made every­thing eas­ier and sim­pler, al­low­ing any­one to take and share an image with op­ti­mum re­sults,” she says of the photo app, adding that In­sta­gram has de­moc­ra­tised ac­cess to pho­tog­ra­phy: “Today's mo­bile de­vices have im­proved pho­to­graphic qual­ity, but it was not like that five years ago, when In­sta­gram in­cluded fil­ters that al­lowed im­ages to be edited on the go, mak­ing them more at­trac­tive if not more pro­fes­sional.”

Vi­sual nar­ra­tive

In­sta­gram tends to put em­pha­sis on the con­cepts of hap­pi­ness, beauty, artistry, and it does not shun such clichés as im­ages of feet with the toes dig­ging into the sand or balls of coloured ice cream piled up in a crys­tal glass. But does this make it un­re­al­is­tic, de­spite its focus on a range of every­day con­cepts? And what about drama or tragedy? “It is true that every­thing is very beau­ti­ful on In­sta­gram and that is lovely to see, but I also think that, as the so­cial an­i­mals we are, we do not open our­selves up to the pub­lic gaze and we do not like to share things that upset us; there are mo­ments we like to keep pri­vate,” says Alonso in ref­er­ence to ex­press­ing in­ti­macy on so­cial media and con­struct­ing a vi­sual nar­ra­tive. What­ever the style, for Alonso the key is shar­ing: “The great thing is cap­tur­ing a mo­ment and shar­ing it,” she says.

How­ever, Alonso puts In­sta­gram's suc­cess over its com­peti­tors (Yahoo's Flickr or Google's Pi­casa) down to one fac­tor: the emer­gence of mo­bile tech­nol­ogy, which soon be­came uni­ver­sal thanks to the adop­tion of smart­phones: “Peo­ple now take pho­tos on the street and want to share them straight away,” she says, which cre­ates an im­me­di­ate need for an app for mo­biles like In­sta­gram.

Yet for Alonso, In­sta­gram is not just a toy ded­i­cated to friv­o­lity, as the shar­ing of im­ages is to make an emo­tional con­nec­tion: “Each per­son cre­ates their own vi­sual lan­guage that re­flects their state of mind and forms part of their per­son­al­ity,” she says. In­sta­gram, she in­sists, is an ex­am­ple of a vi­sual so­ci­ety: “The rate of change in the con­sump­tion of in­for­ma­tion is amaz­ing and at the same time wor­ry­ing,” she says, adding: “Text is on its way down. There is not so much of it when peo­ple can just hit 'play' and record a video or take a photo.”