Are You Having A Good Time?

http://prezi.com/cw_mjsaie4ne/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy

Sam, Kurtis, and Matt: “Are You Really Having A Good Time?”

Goal of the Project:

Go in depth to why our society is so focused on “proving” they had a good time, either by posting pictures on Instagram or other outlets of social networks. We focused on Instagram and looked at why people care so much about how many followers they have, how many likes they get, and if their photo makes their life “appear” cooler. Because whether we’d like to admit it or not, for some reason we do care. As I have worked on this project throughout the term, I’ve asked myself countless times why I post pictures on instagram. And I still don’t really have a reason...

Data Collected: Out of the 90 people that took the survey, almost half of them checked Instagram hourly, and the rest checked daily. Over half of the people posting also said that they post to update their friends and family on life events. Others said to create a portfolio of pictures. However there is a relation between updating friends and then scanning Instagram for non posting purpose. Our survey concluded that most everybody checks their Instagram either hourly or daily, yet on usually will post on a weekly basis. This means that most of the time that people get on Instagram is not to share but to see what others are doing. Another thing is that people cared less about followers than we had anticipated yet over half of the people surveyed said that they cared how many likes they received. When asked if they edited phots before posting most of the responses said yes. Much of them were to enhance or alter an image, taking it away from its natural and original occasion. Some even said to make a photo more lively, which can be seen as making a memory something that it is not. What this means is that people are on Instagram to see others more than to post themselves. And though they do post and care indefinitely about the amount of likes they get, it seems that the social self we take on in Instagram is as important to us as real physical being. We post to update our friends, and we check constantly about new updates from them as well. Our conclusion is that people use Instagram to create and alter moments that happen to create a world that they want others to see them in. We can see this in the ratio of time spent on Instagram versus the time posting and the means of doing so by altering a photo for the more likeliness of the likes they receive.