Tag: Instagram

A legacy disinformation social network that made sharing photos fun.

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Teenage girl in Malaysia kills herself ‘after Instagram poll’

Jamie Fullerton in The Guardian describes the sinister face of social media.

The Guardian

There is a cold inevitability to this headline, a sadness going way beyond the mountain of sadness connected to this girl’s death.

Makes me wonder, what kind of people is social media engineering?

We really are all fucked if we’ve become a world where voting on someone’s death, or life, is given so little thought. My guess is every one of the 69 per cent who voted “death” didn’t think she was serious. Their response to “Really Important, Help Me Choose D/L” was as random as flipping a coin. They didn’t think about the question, or the outcome, they just flipped a tail instead of a head at the toss.

The even more worrying implication is the lack of of critical thinking in her followers, in those who voted. Would this girl still be alive if she had put an “L” before the “D”? I’m going to make a dangerous assumption and say she put the “D” first because she had suicide in mind. Her metric was already headed in that direction, the answer just confirmed her choice. The 69 per cent chose randomly, and followed blindly.

That has ramifications reaching way beyond this girls suicide, taking us somewhere over the horizon, and dropping us in a well so deep we may never get out.

In a complicated world social media makes everything binary, simplifies a mater of life and death into a choice between, “D” or “L”. Ironically they understood the difference between the abstract “D” for “death” and “L” for “life” but not the nuance of putting “D” before “L”.

There are no binary choices. I fear we are forgetting that fact, forgetting how to navigate complexity.

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Every digigraph tells a story

I take a lot of digital photographs or as I like to call them digigraphs. I create them exclusively with my iPhone and the vast array of apps it supports.

I distinguish these images from the photochemical reality created by photography. While analogue and digital photography share a vast array of similarities, there’s something specific, unique, about the images generated digitally.

The digital image is infinitely malleable, giving it a deeply subjective reality. The mobile-computer-camera combination allows us all to capture and shape our perception of the world, and distribute that vision immediately.

These images would not’ve been creating if not for the iPhone. It’s always with me, ubiquitous, allowing me to capture candid moments without the intrusion brought by traditional equipment.

I shoot almost every day, usually walking the streets while trying to keep the sun at my back. I rarely have the camera at eye level, preferring instead to hold it low while keeping a tangental eye on the screen. I cut the earbuds off the supplied headphones to make a digital shutter release so I can capture a scene with a click of the volume button.

I distribute these images across several platforms, first to my digigrah stream LessBeauty // MoreBrains then to Instagram, EyeEm and most recently AMPt Community.

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Another digigraph blog

I have been posting a lot digital photographs recently. There have been so many “digigraphs” of late that I have decided to set up a second web site LessBeauty // MoreBrains. The stream started when I joined Instagram, and while I liked the various quirky Polaroid-like frames they offer, it feels less like a way of creating interesting images, and more like a way of connecting with people, a sort of visual Twitter.

I know it’s obvious but it took me a while to clock that. For me Instagram didn’t really become interesting until I started using Hipstamatic.

Hipstamatic is a digital photography application that shoots square photographs, perfect for posting on Instagram. It also offers a number of software filters to make the image look as though they were taken with an antique film camera. The filters are added in the form of interchangeable lenses and films that can be used in combination to give different photographic qualities to your shot. What can I say it appeals to the geek in me.

At present I like to combine Hipstamatic’s US176 and BlacKey films with a John S. or Lucifer VI lens, but there are a dozen more lenses and films I haven’t even tried yet.

Shortly after discovering Hipstamatic I also came across the idea of app stacking, putting a digigraph through several apps to generate a plethora of interesting results. The example above “Spider” was created by stacking an image taken in Hipstamatic through FrameMagic. I then layered the two images I produced in Blender with a background created in SketchTime. Finally I posted the stacked image on Insagram using the Toaster frame.

I’m not entirely sure what these digigraphs are, other than to say they’re sketches for something as yet to be defined. Instead of posting digigraphs here, all of my digigraph efforts will take up space on LessBeauty // MoreBrains.