Friday, March 6, 2020

Instagram's Impact

Instagram has become one of the most used social media apps in a short amount of time. Instagram was created in the year 2006 by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in San Francisco. After it’s creation, it got developed and is currently owned by Facebook, Inc. Keniv Systome and Mike Krieger created Instagram with the intent of it being similar to Facebook where it’s users can share things about their lives. However, they made Instagram more focused on the photos aspect than Facebook. In june of 2018, Instagram hit one billion active monthly users. Since 2006, Instagram has made many changes and updates to the app to make it even easier to share photos. One of their updates was when they began to allow photos that were not squares to be posed. Now, to a certain size, users can post more of their photo because Instagram allows photos that are horizontal and vertical instead of cutting photos to a square. Another big change they made was when they introduced Instagram stories. The stories feature allows users to post a photo/video that only stays on the account for 24 hours. Features like these are a reason why Instagram is so popular.
Instagram’s popularity has some positives as well as downsides. On the brightside, Instagram allows users to share their lives through photos. It also has made it easy for users to keep up with friends and family as well as celebrities and businesses. Instagram has given its users the ability to create a brand for themselves. Oftentimes now when people apply for a new job, the job requests to see your social media accounts so they know how you portray yourself online. Unfortunately, Instagram impact hasn’t been all good. The popularity of social media as a whole has led to a problem of anything you do on video or as a photo can go viral. Once something is on social media, even if it's a private account, it’s there forever with the ability to be reposted. Going viral can be a good thing depending on what it’s fore, but it also could go very wrong. Additionally social media has created this conception of a “perfect life” that people must achieve. This has caused some users to feel as if they need to look a certain way and do certain things and get however many likes in order for them to be respected by their peers. This pressure that social media has created has caused an increase in anxiety and depression in the younger generations. Although Instagram has its potential downfalls, the app still offers an amazing experience to its users with of the things Instagram does well. Instagram's community guidelines do their best at making sure Instagram is a safe place for it’s users to share their photos in.


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