Our generation has grown up with social media, starting with MySpace and Facebook and now Twitter, Snapchat, and Instagram play a great role in most of our lives. I often find myself trying to do things just “for the gram,” and I ask myself when I started to care so much and why? From a young age we have associated the number of likes and comments we got on a photo with social validation. This habit cannot be changed overnight, but Instagram is experimenting with this idea by hiding likes. This would mean that the user can see how many likes they receive on a photo, but their followers won’t be able to view that number.
They have tested this in a number of other countries, such as Canada, Australia, and Italy, so the question is how would our society react to this change? Would users post more candidly instead of focusing on what their followers would want to see? Or would they stop engaging on Instagram or other social media platforms because they wouldn’t see the point anymore? Another aspect to consider is how would this affect business accounts? Aside from influencers and general users, would this hurt the amount of reach that companies gain from a strong social media following?
There’s a lot of unknown when it comes to changing applications we use every day (remember when Instagram first changed its logo?), but ultimately the bigger picture we have to consider is how big of an impact we want social networks like Instagram to have on our lives and what kind of example we want to set for generations to come when using these applications.