My learning in the social media space came about at a time when I was done with my formal education. I am a frequent user of Instagram, and appreciate the visual medium through which stories are shared, information is spread, and connections are forged. While I am aware of the ethical concerns of security drawbacks of the platform, I would personally declare that it has played a big role in developing my digital and social literacy in a world that is always continuing on a fast road towards change.
Keeping in line with the definition provided by Cormode and Krishnamurthy (2008), Instagram is a social media space since it allows for content created and generated by individual users onto the platform. My activity on the platform is more passive than active. But this is because I choose the interaction to be it so, rather than the platform restricting me to unidimensional interaction. My posts are rare, perhaps one in three months, even though my stories on the site are perhaps weekly uploaded.
As mentioned, Instagram has proven to be a platform due to which I find myself more informed about people’s movements across the world. The media, while reporting movements the #MeToo, #AntiCAA/NRC (India), and #BLM has tended to give a skewed reportage on them, depending on their own political leanings. Coming from highly political country like India, getting a more real-time peak into how people’s movements are carried out, has given me more ideas of the different kinds of learning we all do, outside of the traditional classroom learning.
I appreciate how you describe your experiences on Instagram and talk about the skewed reportage based on political leaning. I think this is a very important that we should be careful about. Social media platforms expose us to huge amount of information every day. How can we be sure whether the information that we see reflects the truth or not? Finding reliable sources on the Internet sometimes might be difficult even for adults. Thus, I wonder what kinds of information students learn “informally” on social media platforms.
While reading your experience of social media, Instagram, I was wondering if the purposes of using social media differs markedly from country to country. As you mentioned, you had a great experience using Instagram and it has become a useful tool for seeing the truth and learned people’s actual movements around the world. Of course, in Korea, social media are used as a political tool, but I’ve (almost) never seen friends who reveal their political leanings through social media. In India, are there many people around you who use Instagram similar to your purposes and interests?
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