Final Project
I made a fake Instagram homepage with an exaggerated layout to see likes, captions, and notifications.
When I read the prompt of doing a final project as something about the Internet on the Internet, my immediate thought was establishing a fake Instagram view of a homepage to elaborate on Internet presence over what is really happening in life. I was going to make another social media page but I don’t like having too many platforms so I wanted to make an edited page instead. In our last project, I wanted to point out things like connection, mistakes being present online despite thinking you deleted it, sticking to what is trendy, etc. I feel like my view of the Internet revolves around online presence and I took this as an opportunity to look at it more in depth. I used photos from my own camera roll as well as google photos to find the exact looks I was going for. I then googled different Instagram notification icons to crop and photoshop onto the collage I had made. I used the app Photo Collage to put these photos together and then used the app Bazaart to add the notifications on top. I then found the website Canva to add text boxes to each photo to represent the captions.
I will start by talking about the notification tab at the bottom. I wanted to find one that showed clear popularity as if this account had a large following and assumed influence among those that follow it. This is to acknowledge the fact that once you have a following on an online platform, you have a huge influence on others. You also realize that the more popular you are, the more photos or related posts about you suddenly appear online. You do a quick search of yourself and you find all these things you didn’t even know where online. I wanted the make the likes on each picture follow a trend I have noticed on Instagram. If your photo isn’t a nice photo of you or if it shows any sort of ‘realness’ outside of having fun then you don’t get much attention. So the photos I have of my dog, or a rainbow, my breakfast, or a person crying naturally received less attention than the photos of me, my friends, or a love interest. It makes the person that owns the profile want to please their audience so they stop posting the content they want and post the content that the Internet has deemed important. All online you see photos of celebrities and typically, the ones that are used in articles are attractive or racy photos. For example, an article would post a photo of say, Demi Lovato, on a beach over a photo of just the beach that she could have posted. The audience wants to connect with the attraction that person makes them feel. This social construct is all over social media platforms. In addition, I added captions that were real versus something ‘cute’ that wouldn’t make you think twice. The real captions get ignored as people don’t want sentimental things on their timelines. Nobody wants to see something online that makes them sad or feel like they need to do more than aimless scrolling. If you like a sad photo then you feel responsible for reaching out to that person to try to make them feel better. If you ignore the sad post, you can act like it was never your responsibility. In comparison to the ‘popular’ posts on this fake page, the serious posts have much less attention.
I got this quote off of an article online: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/fulfillment-any-age/201906/what-do-you-try-hide-about-yourself
“ What others can’t necessarily guess by looking at you are the so-called concealable identities”.
I think it is a perfect quote to summarize how an online Internet presence is truly what you make it to be. If you want to hide something about yourself then you can; and this is what makes the Internet a scary and somewhat dangerous place. Your information can go anywhere, it could remain online forever, and it can create altered mental states in order to please an online audience. There is so much power in the Internet and I don’t think we acknowledge it enough.
