I’ve been seeing a lot of these articles lately. We need someone to write about the alarming homogeneity of articles about the similarity of Instagram photos.
Sources please.
The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
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Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#42This has less to do with Instagram and more to the fact that all art is derived from other art.
Could it have anything to do with the sheer volume and accessibility of 'art' in the modern world? There was a time where thousands of people had to favor an artist/photographer's style in order for them to rise to prominence. Nowadays with people scrolling through hundreds or thousands of Instagram posts a day and voting with their thumbs, the barriers to entry into the 'art' world are much lower.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#43How many millions of people are posting on Instagram? How many billions of photos are on Instagram now? Is it really so crazy to think that all of those billions of photos, you can find groupings of 12 that are similarly composed? How many unique photos are there to take really? I'd be way more impressed if you could somehow come up with a set of a billion photos such that there are no compositional groupings across…
While it is indeed true that humans share a large number of traits that naturally homogenize, to an extent, how we think and act, I'd bet it is ultimately Instagram's interconnectedness between users which favors this kind of content replication. Quantifying social validation by means of like, comment, and follower counts make other users' reactions predictable and, thus, exploitable; I think people who take this kind of hackneyed photos or videos are doing so because they have been proven to work--they already have feedback for that kind of aesthetic and narrative artifices, because they have already been posted by popular accounts and have gotten good results.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#44This has less to do with Instagram and more to the fact that all art is derived from other art.
As an artist I find looking at art on a phone sized device nauseating. I think the size of the ultimate image makes creating homogeneous images much more likely as you can only see the barest hint of detail, even on a retina screen. Seurat's famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is an enormous painting, but seeing it on small screen makes it look like a comic.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#45loosely related, but here is an amazing project by Dutch photographer Hans Eijkelboom (20 years in the making) that explores the topic of 'homogeneity': https://www.citylab.com/design/2014/12/20-years-of-photos-sh... (the book: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0714867152 )
I think this type of work is much better evidence for the claim of cultural homogeneity from the article: The photo series are all taken within short time windows of a couple of hours in the same location.
Instagram on the other hand contains billions of pictures from multiple locations taken over long periods of time. It is only natural to find some repetition and much harder to argue how much of that repetition can be attributed to lack of creativity.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#46Those photos all look amazing. Now I want to replicate those shots and put them on Instagram.
This comment made my day. :)
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#47How many millions of people are posting on Instagram? How many billions of photos are on Instagram now? Is it really so crazy to think that all of those billions of photos, you can find groupings of 12 that are similarly composed? How many unique photos are there to take really? I'd be way more impressed if you could somehow come up with a set of a billion photos such that there are no compositional groupings across…
I read one bit of utopian fiction where the propagation of digital production was limited to a nearby social circle. That way, people weren't constantly comparing their photographs with the best photographer in the world, or their musical compositions with the best musician in the world. People would specialize and create things, but for the benefit of their social circle, not the entire world. I wonder if something…
People are not creating that stuff for others, they are creating it for themselves.
I don't need a social circle which creates content for me.
I'm quite happy that evolution and the masses created tv shows like GoT or other professional high quality content.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#48Yeah, some people lack imagination. I used to make electronic music. I lack imagination. I wasn't good at it. But I had fun doing it nonetheless.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#49If I went to any of those locations I’d take a picture that looks exactly like that but there is a huge difference - the people in it are me or my close ones. And the people watching my travel pictures are our friends.
People who follow random people on Instagram are the enigma, not that they all take the same photos.
Re: The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos
#50https://www.instagram.com/socalitybarbie/ would fit into many of these
It's like she's got the exact same expression on her face in every picture. It's almost doll-like.
And if I hadn't been looking for the joke, I'd have done a double take, because it does look exactly like a real account from a distance.