Students today have much more access to and preference for their smart phones than a personal computer. At any given moment, students are texting, snap-chatting, kiking, tweeting, updating facebook accounts, etc. In this post, I would like to explore Instagram as an Online Literacy Site. Instagram is an app first site whose online version really has little purpose. With more people opting for their phones instead of their pc's and most websites having a "mobile" (version of their) site, the term "online" can no longer be confined to a computer.
In order to access Instagram, students must have an account. Setting up an account is simple. Download the app to your smart device. Choose a user name and a password. A user can also login with a pinterest or facebook account. Now that an account has been set up...select people to follow and allow others to follow you.
What do I see? The first thing you see when you access the Instagram app is the latest picture or video posted by a user you follow. As you scroll down the screen, you see images from the lives of others: a silly video about cassette tapes made by someone feeling nostalgic and sentimental before she "chucks" them out; siblings sporting different versions of a sunhat (one wide brimmed, the other a colander) as they walk with dad to the park; a beautiful arrangement of flowers fresh from an English garden accompanied by an appropriate cup of tea; a hazy sunrise over Lake Washington; s'mores with the Moores over a glowing firepit. These are just a few of the images in my feed today. Each image is preceded by an identifier listing the user who posted it and the time of post. At the bottom of the image, you can also see how many viewers have "liked" the upload and any comments posted about it.
At the bottom of the smart device's screen are five icons that are used to navigate the entire space: home (house), explore (starburst), camera (camera;), following/news (heart in text bubble), and profile (business card?).
The "home" page includes all of the images that those you are following post. "Explore" allows you to search users and hashtags for similar postings. The "camera" is where you create and upload your own content. Updates are sent in the "following/news" section and other business can be taken care of in the profile.
What does it mean? This site is a place for the user to explore their own social identity through the posting of personal images or video that relate to daily life, personal opinions, and connections to places, objects, or others. How does one become "literate" in this space? By using it. "Following" other users. Allowing others to "follow" you. Posting images and videos that articulate emotional, political, economic, or social viewpoints. Documenting the places you've been. Exploring what others are doing through #hashtag searches. Receiving feedback from those who follow you regarding your posts. Offering feedback on the images posted by other users. Even using Instagram as a commercial venue (more and more people are selling products on Instagram). As you navigate through instagram, you connect with people you know, you want to know, whose work you admire, those that are similar to you in some way, etc. The more you connect and contribute the more literate you become in the site. The more information you share, the more feedback you receive.
How do you know? Online literacies are online spaces (websites, social networking sites, blogs, gaming sites, instant messaging, etc) in which users create and/or interact with multimodal content as part of a larger social network of learners in order to explore and create their own social identity. In "Powerful Spaces: Tracing the Out-of-School Literacy Spaces of Latino/a Youth," Elizabeth Moje noted that students "use a variety of written texts and other forms of representation to navigate within and across physical space" (Moje, 16). Instagram as an online literacy site deals with these "other forms of representation"with minimal text. In the article, Moje is referring to language, music, symbols, body language, place, etc. These same forms and many more are visualized in the content created by users in Instagram. A "selfie" of me in front of Grant Wood's American Gothic identifies a place and interest connected with me: the Art Institute in Chicago and an appreciation for American Art. As the site also functions as a social networking site, every image or video posted to the site is either a physical or metaphorical representation of the user. The posts are meant to depict some aspect of the users identity: a like, a dislike, a place or space, an emotion, opinion, etc.
The image to the left is a nostalgic reference to a trip to the ocean, as well as, a looking forward to the events of the coming summer. The user spends summers at the beach and sees it as part of her identity: socially, as she reconnects with people each summer; emotionally, as she has built relationships with the environment; and physically, as this is her residence for two months.
Instagram is also an online image gallery. In "Visual Culture and Literacy Online: Image Galleries as Sites of Learning," B. Stephen Carpenter and Lauren Cifuentes report a study conducted with students using the online image gallery Seeing Culture. In Seeing Culture, students accessed, uploaded, and manipulated images within this online gallery in order to increase their "visual literacy and collaborative interpretation of images, digital videos, and other forms of visual culture" (Carpenter & Cifuentes, 2011: 35). While Instagram users only have the ability to manipulate their own images, they still engage and collaborate with the content of others by posting comments, tagging and #tagging and "liking" images. These exchanges build meaning, connections, and further identity formation as users continue to create content.
In the article, Carpenter and Cifuentes are not making an argument for Seeing Culture as an online literacy site, but rather a site of learning. However, they observe that students begin to cultivate visual literacies. The learning that occurs as students interact with the content helps them to construct meaning from the images within the gallery thus creating and/or developing a deeper understanding of, connection with, and a bank of terminology relating to what they are seeing. I believe these characteristics qualify it as an online literacy site. Likewise, through the posting of images and videos, Instagram users also build literacy as they interact with their own content, as well as the content created by others.
Articles cited in this post:
Moje, E. B. Powerful spaces: Tracing the out-of-school literacy spaces of Latino/ayouth. In K. M. Leander & M. Sheehy (Eds.), Spatializing literacy research and practice (pp. 15-38). New York, NY: Peter Lang.
Carpenter, B. S., & Cifuentes, L. (2011). Visual culture and literacy ONLINE: Image galleries as sites of learning. Art Education,64(4), 33-40.
Two more examples of "literacy"(in the traditional sense) on instagram:
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