Comm 3490 — Week 1 Assigment
There are many forms of media that I use and consider to be my favorite, but if I had to narrow it down and talk about one that stand out to me, that would be Instagram. The reason why I picked this one to be my favorite is because it is the most common app I use on an everyday basis. When I wake up in the morning and do a daily social media check I will always go to Instagram first because I want to see what everyone has posted as well as checking my for you page to see other post from people I don’t follow but share a common interest with. Now, I am not someone who constantly post everyday about my life, my main use for this app is to see what my friends are up to as well as some of the celebrities that I follow. Instagram is much more than an outlet to post pictures becasue I follow my favorite sports teams, news articles, and brands that help keep me updated with whats going on and knowing that what I am seeing or reading is credible becasue it is coming from the main source unlike Twitter, which I also love to use but can sometime be very unreliable. This app includes people like me to see sponsderd post or common pages that have similarities to who I follow that can be considered a micro-level outcome since I am being individually targeted.
My artifact/example for Instagram would be how when you scroll through either snap stories or page you will get ads that relate to maybe what you search, look up on other apps, or promote other pages that go along with who you currently follow. To give an example I have been really into finding new oatmeal recipes due to Tiktok so when I look for products/recipe pages I will get multiple post about an oatmeal recipe or when I look at clothing I get ads for that too because it is individually creating a platform that is targeted just for me. Accoring to Business Insider they say the reason for this is Facebook owns Instagram, “who your friends are, what posts you like, what posts you don’t like, what brands you follow, and more, is used to better target ads to you”. Reading this helps establish a better reasoning as to why this happens becasue we already know that Facebook uses your information to gear resources to you and so they are using that same technique with Instagram. I think from a personal opinion in short term it doesn’t really affect us in a big way becasue of so many other social media platforms using the same techniques, I feel like it can be more of an annoyance at times seeing ads everyday but yet they can sometimes be helpful. Althought it can be an issue in the long run due to people getting annoyed and either switching to a new app or deleting this one.
Living in an era that is filled with so many different social media platforms can be an overwhelming thing becasue you can see the same topics or post on multiple platforms, like how I said above on Facebook owning Instagram they have a feature where you can upload and show people what you just shared on Insta to facebook without having to create a new post. Based on what we have learned so far in our recent lecture is that media has many different modes of models and categories ranging from the intended outcome to the nature of said outcome. Thinking about the different social media accounts that I have I do notice a common trend among all of them and that they are all micro-level since not everyone follows or views the same things as you so what you see can be the total opposite from what they see hence it being an individualistic outcome.
