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.