Author: Andreas

Self-Reflection

Social media is a mistake: Let me start the new decade in the Photo category with a video. In the past year I challenged myself and take a picture every day. The project was inspired by an old, fellow student. It sounded easy in first place, turned into a challenge soon and I use to self-reflect upon achievements and new experiences. Taking a photo of something new every day will make you start think about what you did. Sometimes, after a long day in office, it requires plenty of discipline to pay attention to your schedule and environment.

Instagram

To measure the result, when starting, I decided to go for Instagram. Get Likes has never been the goal. The level of interaction with the platform and exposure to the crowd I got there gave plenty of insight into how the crowd works. But the service never convinced for many reasons. As stated elsewhere, the experience just re-affirmed my feeling that social media is a mistake.

The medium is driven by vein and pride, just as Scott Galloway put it, the seven deadly sins. These are not good guidance in first place. And they are by no means compatible with the goals of the project, even though it generated plenty of attention and positive feedback.

Purpose

And finally, the company owning Instagram, Facebook, requires to accept a license through their Terms of Service to grant to them a non-exclusive, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings) for purposes of making the Instagram Service available. While comprehensible the service needs authority over content to offer the service, these purposes are too broad for what I want to achieve. Instagram is driven by users registered and wouldn’t allow the audience I have in mind to consume the photos without registering. Just try scrolling through the page, it will require registration quickly.

Resolution

You can end this license anytime by deleting your content or account. Following the Terms of Service, this is the only way to not grant these. And while Instagram offers means to download all content, this still ain’t too easy: all the content over there has meta information, like comments and or locations, that are not straight forward to transfer. Which brings me to one of next years resolutions: not only continue my own project here – to take a photo every day as an act of self-reflection. But also to migrate existing content from Instagram over here.

And the same is true for other social media. For example, LinkedIn does also leverage such mechanisms. While the above is only an example, I try to put more attention to these models. And this page shall serve as a basis to replace others in the .

Social media is a mistake. Take back the web and decentralise the next decade.