On Instagram

Abstract
Today’s information societies have become reliant on consumer production. With cheap and ubiquitous technologies such as cell phones, consumers are enabled and encouraged to casually produce videos (see YouTube), photographs (see flickr), and textual responses (see Twitter) to their growingly mediated lives. Engagement in these casual productions is empowered by “always on” networking, enmeshing the consumers in a web of social ties that are predicated on production. Taking the “Instagram” iPhone app as a site of study, this paper will examine the user experience of social photographic production and ask what engagement in this community of casual, “always on,” networked provides. Do users produce for others or for themselves? How do users relate to their production and the production of others? How do the social elements of Instagram (with ‘following’ features borrowed from services like Twitter) inform and shape the media practices of Instagram users? This paper will explore these questions as symptomatic of consumer production in the age of ‘personal’ web culture, consumption, and production.

From Business Analysis

 * Profile at Crunch Base
 * Taking off
 * Rumored to have 1 Million Users
 * Raising Money
 * 20 Million $ of Investment via CNET
 * Mashable talks about its Branding

From Cultural Analysis

 * User/Blogger Backlash
 * The Allure of Instagram
 * The Hype of Photo Sharing via NY Times

Digital Culture Context

 * Just How Much Money Can iPhone Apps Make? via TechCrunch
 * Zittrain anti-Apps (b/c they are Un-Generative)
 * iPhone App 'Gold-Rush' via LA Times
 * The iPhone and its Consumption via Continuum Journal
 * History of Consumer Telecommunications // Also saved in PDFs
 * Is Instagram a new Social Media Model? via Mashable
 * Instagram to Android

Photography

 * Click! The Smithsonian Exhibit
 * Click! Article on Representation (talks bout Walt Whitman)

Other Zackipedia Entries
The_YouTube_Reader

Resources from April 1 on

 * Real Instagram API -
 * Expogram: Instagram as Photo Exhibition Project
 * Apple to introduce social photography apps?

Actual Instagram Use

 * Collection of Photos I've shared at "@zmccune"
 * Postagram
 * Postagram CNET Review
 * Postagram on Gizmodo
 * Instagram and the App Ecosystem
 * Woodshed (allows you to see facts about users = not working)
 * Printagram (print them on a poster?!)


 * Instagram Crash in Mid April
 * Instagramers (Dedicated User Blog)
 * Interview with @gladsheim


 * Make Photobooks from Instagram
 * My personal Photobook


 * Instaprint - Service where you rent printer services!
 * iPhone image of Space Shuttle goes Viral

Problems

 * Interviewing Users
 * Failure Potential of App
 * Limitation of iPhone OS

Research & Methodology

 * API Details
 * Working publicly? Thru Comment threadS?
 * Work with Company? Behind the scenes?
 * Is there a way to get emails? (w/o private API calls)

Final Writing

 * Full Dissertation & Five Page Summary for "Consumer Production in Social Media Networks: A Case Study of the 'Instagram' iPhone App"
 * Coverage of Dissertation
 * On The Next Web
 * On Instagramers
 * On AppFreak

Other
Part of At Cambridge