IXD104 – Week 10 – Manufactured Fictions in the age of Instagram

Today’s lecture was more informal than usual, instead going bit off topic and looking at the rise of technology and social media in today’s society and how it can lead to people creating manufactured fictions of their normal lives.

We looked at deepfake and how it is used in todays society, watching a video of how an ordinary man was able to take thousands of clips of Tom Cruise and use these to deepfake the actors face onto his, going viral on TikTok. It has also been used in much more serious contexts, like when the Russian Government used it on the Ukraine’s President trying to fool the Ukraines troops to stand down with a deepfake plea from the president.

The rise of technology and social media has also fuelled the rise of fake news and hyperbole which is influenced today by Global Leaders e.g. Boris Johnson and Donald Trump

“We shape our tools and there after our tools shape us” – Marshall McLuhan

A part of the lecture I enjoyed was the war of hipstamatic section.

The precursor to Instagram – Hipstamatic is a digital photography application for iPhone sold by Hipstamatic, LLC. It uses the phone’s camera to allow the user to shoot photographs, to which it applies a number of software filters to make the images look as though they were taken with a vintage film camera.

After Facebook bought Instagram, Hipstamatic was perceived by VCs as an Instagram copycat, and user downloads started to dwindle. Worse, Hipstamatic was hemorrhaging money.

The final part of the lecture highlighted a major flaw in society today with the pressures of social media and how people edit and change their photos to make them ‘social media ready’ and how this sets unrealistic expectations for those viewing these social media posts. The tools available to these ‘social media influencers’ today means that mental health conditions like body dysmorphia and low confidence is growing in todays society.