I wanted to address a point brought up in the Instagram city piece about the aesthetic of instagram. I think it is interesting how you can look through the years at photos and see a consistent trend of filters used from 2014-present. Not only do people tend to follow a theme of “showing off” a particular life/lifestyle on instagram, the way it is done seems to be similar from user to user.
I also thought it was funny how Instagram and Snapchat are grouped together in the Snapchat piece, and Facebook has been thrown out as something only old people use. I find (and this is completely anecdotally) that the people I know who use snapchat to update their lives, sending snaps to new people, tend to be high school age rather than college age. I have found that the people I know don’t use snap nearly to the extent they used to; the disappearing act has actually become old/annoying.
Interesting. And so with age group differences, the uses seem different as well. Facebook might be more rampant with conspiracy theories of extreme kinds, because it is typically not the high school age people who make up and spread those.
But what you mention about trends WITHIN a platform–the types of filters people use, for example–is very interesting. What does it mean, do you think, that “fashions” (or trends) establish themselves, as it were automatically?