For this week I wanted to call attention to the Facebook Notification menu. When you log into facebook you will almost always see a bright red number next to the icon of the earth to let you know that you have new notifications. Your eye is drawn to it and you click on it. Often it won’t even be things that pertain to you specifically, it will be things that your friends have posted or things that they are doing near you. It’s like facebook is so desperate to get you to pay attention to it that it will find the most ridiculous reasons to give you notifications.

For my project, I decided to take the common social media platform Instagram and use it in a manner contrary to what it was intended to be. I decided to take a black screen and post it on instagram as if it were a real photo, and add a caption to make it seem like there is content in the picture. I tagged each picture #blindinstagramproject, and wanted to see how many people would “like” a picture if there was nothing in it.

In addition, I was taking note of how many/which people liked it, because there is a trend on Instagram of liking every post on your timeline, regardless of the content.

What I found is that, with every picture I posted, the only people who liked them were members of my family. I take that to mean they will like things I post regardless of context. They’ll support me with whatever stupid stuff I post on my social media. Interestingly, I didn’t get anyone asking what the heck I was doing posting black screens on Instagram every day. It shows that people don’t take the time to question when weird things show up on their timeline, they’ll just accept the weirdness and move on.

This last picture is to show comparison between the amount of likes I got on the three pictures for the project and ones I have posted previously. As you can see, the amount of likes on the previous posts are exponentially bigger than the ones for the project.

In doing this project, my hypothesis of people just liking posts without paying attention to the content was proven to be false. However, there were people who did like my posts, members of my own family. I didn’t anticipate this, but it goes to show how family will support you even when what you’re doing makes no sense.

I feel like the social media I look at the most is my school email, because that is where important messages are sent. I check it constantly throughout the day, not wanting to miss anything that might be important to my school work or something. The things that I immediately check are 1, if there are any new emails, and 2. who the emails are from, because I will pay attention to important emails, but disregard and not read the unimportant ones.