Photo cameras / Photo albums vs. Instagram

Photoprahy always fascinated our society. It gave people the chance to capture special moments in pictures. Since the invention of digital cameras and hence digital photography the process of developping and editing pictures has become easier. Through the internet People have been also able to send photos to their family and friends via E-mail and store them in a digital photoalbum. With the rise of social media such as facebook and twitter, social networking apps concerning photography have also become relevant in the recent years.

Instagram, an app for sharing photos and short videos, was first launched on 6th of October, 2010 in the App store. Though Instagram is not a new invention in means of photography, it is a new way of spreading and sharing pictures with family, friends and the rest of the world.

The app allows users to directly take pictures with their smartphone and upload them on their profile. Depending on the user’s account settings these pictures will be visible for a selected number of users or everyone who enters the Instagram webpage. Instagram also provides photography filters with which its users can modify and enhance their photos. Furthermore users can add hashtags or additional informations to their photos e.g. location to link it with other photographs. Using the browsing function users can look either for a specific user they want to follow or pictures with a certain hashtag.

Instagram is regarded as a type of micro blog. Popular users share their everyday life in photos and videos and often collaborate with companies. Thus these users usually promote a certain product by taking a photo of themselves using it or offer a promotion code through their profile.

While traditional photography and putting together a photo album usually requires a certain amount of time, Instagram provides its user a fast way to express themselves in pictures and videos and share these with the rest of the world through the app or even other social media platforms with just one click.  Instead of collecting certain photos (e.g. vacation) in one photo album Instagram users can upload relevant pictures on their Instagram account and add not only a matching hashtag (e.g. #vacation2015) but also the relevant location.

Nowadays, Instagram is one of the most successful digital photo service. Kodak the photo company used to employ more than 140.000 people. In comparison, Instagram did not have more than 13 employees by the time it was acquired by facebook. Although traditional photography remains still important in society apps like Instagram has clearly gained a significant popularity and will keep on doing so in the future whereas traditional photography will become less common especially concerning the younger generations.

Concerning the difference between the Internet and the web I think that the Internet is worldwide network which consist of many individual computer networks. It offers many services such as e-mail, chats etc.. One of these services is the world wide web which enables the transmission of webpages. In order to be able to display these webpages users are required to have browsers such as Internet Explorer or Google Chrome. The web uses hyptertext transfer protocols to transmit the webpages. In order to find relevant content user have to know the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).