Ah, Instagram. The digital land of filters, hashtags and
a never-ending line of images. There are a few basic rules to
using everyone's favourite photo-sharing app, which can be found here.
These rules help shape the way we present our lives
on social media. When we signed up, we weren't told how many times a day to
post, or what photos were appropriate to be posted. We didn't know what the
stand on emoji usage was, or what a throw-back Thursday even was.
The use of hashtags started on Twitter, to help organise the posts and
group similar ones together in a single thread. That spilled over into
Instagram, with #squadgoals and #fitspo becoming easily the most used tags.
Possibly the most Insta-synonomous tag, #nofilter, is still popular. By using
hashtags and grouping their posts in the same place, a sense of community was
created and facilitated among users. Scrolling through hashtags became the easiest way to find people who
liked the same things that you did, and you could extend your reach.
Much like hashtags, "space and place denote a common experience" (Tuan, Y. 1977). Tuan goes on to expand on the relations of space and place, and how we make them our own. He mentions the merging definition of space with that of place. Although the two seem synonomous with each other, space is a far more abstract concept than place. The two ideas need the other in order to be defined. If you thinks of space as something that allows movement, then "place is pause; each pause in movement makes it possible for location to be transformed into place" (Tuan, Y. 1977).
References
1) Tuan, Y (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. University of Minnesota Press, USA. ISBN O-7131-6221.
No comments:
Post a Comment