Instagram…A Review

     The researchers Weilenmann, Hillman, and Jungselius (2013) investigated how ins tag ram was used to communicate visitors’ experiences while visiting a museum of natural history.  Visitors used their smartphones to take pictures of various pictures of various exhibits that they commented on and shared with friends and acquaintances on Instagram.  The researchers exploited certain features that only smartphones provided instead of the usual camera.

     This paper focused on the photo sharing aspect that Instagram provided  through its smartphone application.  This included its dedicated mobile application that allowed users to adjust and manipulate pictures before uploading them online.  The researchers analyzed the process of creating and sharing Instagram emphasizing the formulation of captions, hashtags, and photographic choice and the audience.  

     Surprisingly, museums allowed smartphone usage.  The exploited the opportunity of using them as personal guides.  It opened the doors of social media usage as a guide to the “Arts” as the central role in learning in informal environments. The goal of the museum and galleries was to use social media to facility  new types of participation with visitors.

     The researchers found out that social media provided enrichment to a museum’s authenticity by enabling it to maintain a dialog with its audience in real-time (pp. 1845).  Smartphones possessed a GPS locator that allowed users to check- in and share their locations with friends. This lent authenticity to the Instagram message.

   However the visitors were concerned about balancing the subject choice, aesthetics, and captioning when producing  content or hashtag.  Instagram with data sets were easily located but the others used hashtags or mentioned the name of the museum within the content so that followers could identify the context of the message.

    This was an excellent article that conveyed how social media was used in an intellectually controlled environment.  It showed the enrichment experience that the online viewers received by the visitors’ use of social media in their engagement with the various exhibits.  But there are still some concern by exhibition developers that are apprehensive about control issues with outside technology use in museums.

Reference:

Weilenmann, A., Hillman, T., & Jungselius, B. (2013, April). Instagram at the museum: communicating the museum experience through social photo sharing. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 1843-1852). ACM.