Rest In Peace, still images on Instagram
Ok, I’m a little bit sad because the Internet is changing and I don’t like it.
My favourite thing to create outside of marriage ceremonies, are photos. Video is fine, but there’s something so beautifully finite about a photo.
A photo says everything it wants to say and no more. You don’t need volume up, and you can give it as much attention as you like. You’re not forced to spend a certain amount of time on it. You can spend all day looking at and thinking about a still photo, or half a second.
The medium requires nothing, but everything off you. You can just as easily swipe past it as much as it can change your life.
High quality and colour graded is nice, but I think about the first computer I owned. The entire screen was 640 pixels wide, and 480 pixels high, and each pixel could be one of 256 colours. Nothing fancy, but I saw photos that changed me on that screen.
So Instagram, Facebook, and Meta are pretty much moving away from still photos. Recent changes mean the entire company is deprioritising photos and prioritising Reels. Think about the last time you saw something on a Meta platform that wasn’t a moving picture.
So if we want to stay in touch, it’s gotta be over video. Unless you’re on somewhere cool like Twitter, Glass, or Micro.Blog I guess.
Video killed the photograph star.
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