Sometimes I wonder where I would be in life if I didn’t have access to the digital world for as long as I have. It has been a part of so many different aspects of my life; so many friendships, trips, conversations and life changing decisions. Yet it hasn’t been until I started to understand ethnography, that I really started to look at the role it played in my life, and perhaps the different roles it could play around the world.
I recently went to Colorado University in the US for a 6 month exchange, during this process I had to undertake a search for accommodation. As many students at UOW would understand the Buy Swap and Sell Facebook group is one of the easiest routes available to finding accommodation, and other relevant information. So I figured that it would be something similar in the US, apparently not.
Facebook in the US isn’t really used in the same way it is used over here, in fact its not really used at all. Where we would use it to search, and get in contact with many different connections in the area, they would do this mostly through Instagram and Snapchat. After some initial readjustment I was able to align myself with my peers and become comfortable with their standards of digital communication and storytelling.
The most distinct of these readjustments would be in the ‘direct message’ (DM) culture. In Colorado this mostly took place over the Instagram platform. My peers were drifting away from Facebook use for cultivation of friendship groups. It is seen more and more in the states as a dying platform, and so people are less ready to respond to messaging and communication on it. Instagram though is consistently updated with different parts of peoples day-to-day, and most communication was done via this, or by quick phone calls, more often than not on loudspeaker.
In this drifting away from Facebook we can perhaps see a unique phenomenon to internet users in Australia, and it happened just last month. Over here we are quite accustomed to internet hoaxes along the lines of “I DO NOT GIVE PERMISSION FOR (x company) TO USE MY IMAGES, THE DEADLINE TO SHARE THIS AND STOP (x company) FROM PERMANENTLY IS…” and so on, mostly through our interaction with older members of society on Facebook. In this scenario on the Instagram platform (Wired 2019) we see multiple high ranking celebrities and officials fall for the hoax. Perhaps we can apply this to the fact that they are not so closely connected to this phenomena on Facebook? This can be theorized as “A meme’s mutation rate characterizes the population distribution of its variants, in accordance with the Yule process.” and “the mechanism driving change in diffusing information has important implications for how we interpret and harness the information that reaches us.” (Lada et al. 2014).
I am able to now understand the changes I subconsciously made in adapting to the American culture. Mirzoeff (1999, p.1) describes this culture aptly, “human experience is now more visual and visualised than ever before” when talking about our current relationship with screens, images and culture. This is perhaps amplified in the US through a more visual expression of self and culture, thus suiting the much more image based platform of Instagram. This is interesting to note as patterns of movement and influence in Australia could very much follow suit in the next few years.
References:
- Lada, et al. 2014, ‘Information Evolution in Social Networks’, Cornell University, accessed online 5th Sep 2019, https://arxiv.org/abs/1402.6792
- Matsakis, L 2019, ‘An Old Instagram Hoax Fools a Bunch of Celebrities’, Wired, accessed online 4th Sep 2019, https://www.wired.com/story/instagram-copyright-hoax-returns/
- Mirzoeff, N 1999, An Introduction to Visual Culture, Routledge, London, UK.
Daniel Ward 