Photography education seeks to educate in the creative uses of the medium, to provide a critical framework for the interpretation of images, and to further visual literacy (Rubinstein, 2009). However, being a photographer today is compromised by the complexities of interactions in our digital culture, social media, and the sophistication of mobile devices. Whilst we have never been more connected, the rise of the Internet and digital image technology has had a profound effect on the medium of photography and what it means to be a photographer. This study explores photography students’ responses to the culture of ubiquitous mobile and networked photography by asking how BA and MA Photography students at the London College of Fashion (UAL) perceive Instagram and its influence on them and the development of their professional practice. The study took a phenomenographic approach. Data was gathered through eight semi-structured student interviews about how Instagram’s social feedback mechanism and algorithmic mediation affect their self-expression, inspirations, self-presentation, professional identity, and critical reflection.
Findings suggest that Instagram’s social feedback mechanism and algorithmic mediation negatively impact most students, but the precise impact varies depending on the students’ expectations, self-esteem, and professional goals. To become a photographer now in our uncertain economic climate of produsage (Manu, 2015) opens up wider debates on the networked image, such as originality, social relevance, quantified social capital, agency, power distribution, identity formation, and authenticity. As such, my original contribution, the ‘palm tree effect’, names a formulaic process of mediating identity through social media.
Written by Claudia Brookes | PUBLISHED ON 21st September 2026 | Image by Nick Fancher on Unsplash
Editor’s note: This article is an abridged version of a Masters thesis first written in 2018. The author revised the article in 2026 to incorporate current literature (see section ‘Revisiting research and literature in 2026’
Introduction
Contemporary culture can be termed an ‘algorithmic culture’ (Gillespie, 2014): a digital culture in which much of our social, cultural, professional practices, everyday activities, and more broadly, social interactions and our processes of communication are largely mediated through online algorithmic services. As tools for building networks and identity formation, digital technology, social media, and photography have opened up new perspectives in seeing the world and oneself. In addition, 2.0 technological advancements within online platforms are continuously developing new ways of communicating, working, and constructing professional identities.
Instagram is an image-based social media platform that has been hailed for its self-expression for the masses (Singh-Kurtz, 2018). Furthermore, it has a social feedback mechanism built in which opens up opportunities for Likes, Follows, and Comments. This consequently results in a much broader problem for continual social comparison and validation, quantifying success and popularity. Additionally, a large part of Instagram interactions are mediated through algorithmic systems. As such, algorithms ‘find’ the information we are looking for, suggest or recommend potential accounts to follow, or images we might be interested in that might fit our taste or, more critically, increase our engagement and use of Instagram. The algorithm structures hundreds of updates coming from our network according to what or whom we might enjoy seeing the most, and identifies ‘trending images’ that surface in the news feed that have been liked the most (Gillespie, 2014). The breadth of this phenomenon has not gone unnoticed by academics. Many have come to introduce algorithms as powerful factors that fundamentally shape the production and distribution of images, and more broadly communication processes in digitally mediated societies, with profound consequences (Kitchin, 2016; Pariser, 2012; Gillespie, 2014). Algorithmic mediation, consumption, and how it shapes ‘what you see’ and ‘who sees you’ becomes a complex area for navigating online identities, intrinsic and extrinsic motivations such as validation or commercial gain, and consequently, how the world is perceived.
Within this field, the impact on Instagram users’ mental health is being highlighted in mainstream media. This is important to explore because visual knowledge, authenticity, and professional practice are now inextricably linked to a ‘Like’ economy (All I know is what’s on the Internet, 2018), and the full impact of social media is not yet fully understood, and so requires further research. However, another concern that continues to go unheeded is the way in which Instagram’s social feedback mechanism and algorithmic mediation affects photographers, their self-expression and usage, for the creation of professional identities in a world where ‘I’ has become a commodity for sale. Therefore, how we know ourselves and portray this becomes tied up with professional success (Burbridge, 2016).
The unstoppable rise of social media necessitates that we become ever more entwined with algorithms and computer programs of varying complexity and purpose. Through photography’s rapid dematerialisation into digits and bytes and the marriage of the digital image with the algorithm, it determines significant implications for our relationship with and uses of photography. Additionally, because algorithm activity is invisible, complex, and opaque, it is hard to decipher (Diakopoulos, 2013; Kitchin, 2016). Similarly, further research is needed on how ‘open’ the algorithms are about how they come to their results. We market algorithms as authoritative, mathematical, and intelligent, readily willing to base our own value on such systems whose process of decision-making is largely unknown (Fry, 2018). From an ethical standpoint, finding a framework that regulates companies that make algorithms, and raising questions of why we as social beings have a tendency to accept and trust this computational logic, would be an important step in safeguarding users from what is essentially a massive social experiment: ‘There’s been a wake-up call for a lot of these people as the unintended consequences of these creations have become much clearer’ (Fry, 2018).
Instagram outwardly markets itself as an important platform for photographers, which necessitates participation for the networking and promotional benefits. Through partnerships with Getty and National Geographic (Seymour, 2015), two high-profile image institutions, Instagram has succeeded in marketing itself to photographers.
For educators, understanding how Instagram and its computational mechanisms work and affect young students when entering higher education will shed light on the networked image in a professional context, as well as how best to navigate these shifts in digital culture, and contribute towards identifying how this is impacting photography’s identity as a discipline. From a teaching and learning perspective, it will help underpin why and how the curriculum needs to be developed, and assess how we can ensure students are equipped with the skills necessary for employment.
Through such inquiry into these micro-contexts, this dissertation aims to explore the impact and influence of Instagram’s social feedback mechanism and algorithmic mediation. Parallel to this, some of the top skills as stated by the HEA (2016) required for graduate employability include resilience, creativity, problem-solving, and critical thinking. Whether or not this is due to a fragmentation of the workplace, what this points to is an overarching issue: that now it is no longer about professional knowledge alone, but skills to face uncertainty and challenge. This is important to note because it has become a responsibility for universities to provide more than professional knowledge; they are asked to demonstrate that they are effective. Consequently, questions regarding HEIs’ promise on employability are brought to the fore.
The ‘palm tree’ effect
The rationale for this study stems from a deeper level of thought and criticality regarding my experience of Instagram, and its relation to critical media theory concerning the simulacrum and simulation. The concept of the ‘Palm Tree Effect’ takes root from Baudrillard’s 1981 writing, which theorises the simulacrum as a material image made as a representation of a person or thing, yet without possessing its substance or qualities (Sandoz, 2003). The palm tree effect refers specifically to the simulacrum of a palm tree against a pink wall, a well-known trend born on Instagram and replicated for its pleasing aesthetics across countless user profiles. Sometimes the wall was never pink, sometimes the plant was plastic. Consequently, it has become an empty sign; a sign not so much about the communication of meaning, but rather about the ‘learning effects on perceptions, sensations and sensations to which we can be subject’ (Kelly, 1998: 518).
As a sign, it says: “I am trendy, I have disposable income, I know the aesthetic codes of my generation, and I can produce a desirable image.” The image has become a pure currency of social capital. In this sense, Instagram becomes a world where we can experience the hyper-real, held in the grip of simulacra, and ‘one where media and medium are not simply located in their own hermetically sealed spaces, but dispersed around us in all forms of experience’ (Kelly, 1998: 517).
Baudrillard (1981) suggests that the world we live in has more and more information, yet less and less meaning. Simulacra emerges from the endless reproduction of an image, to the point where it becomes so disconnected from the original that its meaning fundamentally changes. My interest lies in the simulacrum of photographic trends, signs and symbols in society, a phenomenon that has been accelerated by the immediacy of real-time uploading and sharing. I am particularly concerned with the resulting implications of this for photography students’ practice, including their sense of self-expression. However, this is not to suggest in any way that the trend is inherently negative, or that students lack agency. Rather, it is to ask how this condition might consequently move us to view images with new possibilities of interpretation, where, in a critical sense, sensation becomes the focus instead of meaning.
This is a concept I feel warrants further dissection, not just for scholars but for educators too, in assessing a new condition for thinking about the networked image. As Kelly (1998: 517) puts it:
‘…the artwork, then, is neither an original nor a copy nor a representation. It is a simulacrum, a work that forms the part of a series that cannot be referred to as an original beginning.’
Research questions and purpose
University curricula acknowledge that we live in an uncertain economic climate, and frameworks such as UAL’s Creative Attributes Framework, which was funded by the Higher Education Academy for ’embedding and enhancing enterprise and employability into the curriculum’ (UAL, 2018), demonstrate this. A question such as ‘what is meant by employment?’ is further ignited. Similarly, questions regarding earning potential on graduation for art students in relation to other subjects are increasingly adding accountability to HEIs.
To this end, my research focuses on young people interested in entering the professional field of photography, i.e., photography students. As such, this research aims to explore:
- How photography students understand, experience, and use Instagram within an algorithmically mediated culture.
- The psychological and motivational influence of Instagram.
- The consequential effects of Instagram on photography students’ professional practice and critical reflection.
The research was carried out in 2018, just three years after Instagram’s inception, in response to much research concentrated towards the impact on teenagers. However, very little of this research acknowledged any impact on photographers or adults over 18. This became a contentious issue for me as a photographer, educator at UAL, and researcher in London, arguably a global centre for photography.
Theoretical framework
My research reviewed how the networked image has shifted the role of the photographic image, and how the ways in which algorithmic mediation impacts social life – with social platforms being engineered to foster addiction. The aim was to understand and shed light on a number of areas identified through a theoretical framework of mediation, in order to contribute towards this undeveloped area of research. As such, mediation theorises the audience to a point where it uproots the dichotomies of the traditional study of cultural and media theory. By integrating ‘audience’ as a theoretical framework, it allowed me to ‘inform the understanding of media power as it operates in the micro-contexts of consumption without divorcing those issues from those of macro-structural processes’ (Morley, 1992, p. 40). To this end, a social constructivist approach was taken to discover social and socio-psychological processes grounded in the data collected (Gibbs, 2010).
Methodology
Research approach
Due to the explorative nature of my research, the methodology required a qualitative approach to enable the collection of rich and detailed data. With the objective to explore the social and psychological influences of Instagram on students, the study took the principles of phenomenography as a methodology in the design of the approach to collecting data. The focus was on gaining an understanding of perceptions and experiences. It was important to acknowledge that students would have different concepts and understandings through their own experiences, including their social, cultural, and educational backgrounds. Phenomenography was therefore chosen as a methodology specifically because it prompts investigation into others’ experiences of a phenomenon.
Furthermore, the philosophy of phenomenography is underpinned by the constructionist paradigm, relating it to a field of knowledge which is defined by having experience as the subject of study (Marton, 1981; Ornek, 2008). It takes a non-dualistic approach where the aim is not to find a singular essence. Through an inductive approach, theories were subsequently drawn from the data, where the aim to see the ‘collective reflection by students on different ways of making sense of a phenomenon’ (Collier-Reed & Ingerman, 2013, p. 247) was made possible. The study was interested in a second-order perspective in which the world is ‘described as it is understood’ (Ornek, 2008; Marton, 1981). Phenomenography is subjectivist in its ontological stance (Ornek, 2008), rooted in the belief that multiple realities exist through personal and social constructions (Gray & Malins, 2004; Erlandson, 1993), and knowledge is the result of individual cognition. The wider epistemology is interpretivist and rooted in constructionism, which considers meaning rather than being subjective, as something humans construct through making sense of and interpreting the world around them. This understanding is consistent with a social constructionist approach (Gergen, 1999, cited by Taylor & Ussher, 2001). The framing of this study was rooted in the belief that the medium is the message, where its sheer presence in social life fundamentally transforms the nature of communication and those involved in it (McLuhan, 1967).
Interview method and design
The research followed a semi-structured interview method, allowing for the participants to freely talk about their own conceptions. I took a ‘traveller approach’ (Kvale, 1996, p. 4). Twenty-four questions were developed to ask students to reflect on how they use Instagram as a professional photographer and how they feel about the platform in relation to their self-expression, practice, and the social feedback mechanism within algorithmic mediation. Further details were sought on the effects on professional practice, behaviour, and artistic development. The aim was to explore the use of Instagram without undue implication or suggestion. To do this, I set out my questions beforehand and then cross-referenced them with my own prior assumptions (Tufford & Newman, 2010). Through specific phrasing of questions such as ‘Does Instagram affect the perception of your own work?’ I was able to avoid questions leading to desired answers. The aim was single-fold: for questions to open up the discussion, and then become a prompt if dialogue was to wear thin. This meant that the interviews were not identical and allowed for in-depth conversations to be facilitated, and ‘rich’ data to be collected based on individual experiences.
Sampling
This study took a purposive sampling approach through the traditions of grounded theory (Gibbs, 2010), which I adopted in order to gain certain categories of students. A total of eight participants were recruited through self-selection across BA Photography and MA Photography cohorts, where my research was open to a potential 200 students. Seidman (2013) suggests using concepts of ‘sufficiency’ and ‘saturation’ as a method to decide how much is enough. It was felt that eight would be enough to satisfy saturation and sufficiency because all my participants are under similar social, structural, and educational conditions (Seidman, 2013). Each interview took between 20–50 minutes and was recorded for data analysis purposes.
Analysis process
In line with phenomenographic practices, the interview data was analysed with the intention to focus on interpreting the transcripts ‘within the context of the group’ (Akerlind, 2012, p. 117). The interviews were transcribed and analysed as I went through the interview process in line with a grounded theory approach (Gibbs, 2010). Through the intellectual traditions of grounded theory, I started with descriptive coding and moved to inductive coding, which allowed for themes identified ‘to be strongly linked to the data themselves’ (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 14).
The analysis process combined grounded theory with Braun & Clarke’s six-step process of thematic analysis. I began reading and rereading the individual transcripts to get a sense of the overall picture. I then looked for any words which were repeated more than twice in each participant’s transcript, looking for repetition-driven themes. My process was initially inductive, progressing semantically at a surface level of meaning. However, because my study is rooted in the constructionist paradigm, I then continued beyond the semantic and focused on a latent thematic analysis, where ‘broader assumptions, structures, and meanings could be theorised as underpinning what has been articulated’ (Braun & Clarke, 2006, p. 13).
Ethical considerations
For ethical considerations of the research planned, I referred to BERA (2011) for ethical guidelines for educational research. I was given clearance by UAL in April 2018. From an ethical standpoint, I had a responsibility to ensure that I did not distort the intended meaning of the participant to make sure the interpretation acquired was as accurate as possible. I used pseudonyms to secure anonymity when presenting the data collected. I recorded the interviews to allow me to use participants’ words like for like where possible. I did not use any data that may be offensive or upset someone who was not aware of the research taking place. I also aimed to conduct the research in a quiet, private place at the convenience of the participant. An incentive for participation was offered through one hour of studio time with 1:1 tuition. Following BERA (2011), consent was obtained from all participants before the research was conducted, and a form was signed ensuring they understood they could withdraw at any time.
Bracketing and positionality
I considered my own biases and assumptions as a researcher and the implications of this on data collection and analysis. As a photographer who has had very little success with Instagram, I had limited time and patience to take a strategic approach to Instagram’s algorithms and feedback mechanisms. However, such a position became a strength in identifying social issues and a drive for further exploration. I implemented the concept of bracketing in designing my questions in order to ‘mitigate the potential deleterious effects of unacknowledged preconceptions related to the research’ (Tufford & Newman, 2010, p. 81) and thereby increase the rigour of the project.
Limitations
One of the main limitations of this study is that the students self-selected, so I had no control over variance in sampling such as gender, age, or culture. Another predominant limitation is that my sample group was formed from UAL students alone and therefore cannot be representative of the wider population. Due to time constraints, this study was also limited to students only; future research could involve educators or professional practitioners.
Findings
Use of Instagram in practice
Students reported varied usage patterns, from professional-only and personal blogging to passive observation. Notably, 50% of participants had either distanced themselves from Instagram or deleted their accounts entirely, a surprising finding given that all participants were self-selected photography students. This pattern of disappointment spanned both undergraduate and postgraduate cohorts. The remaining 50% exhibited heavy or addictive engagement. One student stated: “As bad as it is, you need it… you need it to stay connected, you need it to learn, you need it to grow” (Alice).
Across all eight participants, the most frequently repeated words were overwhelmingly negative: bubble, ego, fake, meaningless, dopamine, insecure, bad, pressure, and sad. Only portfolio appeared as a positive professional association. Students described anxiety, self-doubt, and feelings of inadequacy. One participant explained: “I deleted my Instagram because my perspective changed… I felt my behaviour was ridiculous” (Richard). Another noted: “People are getting dropped because of not having enough followers… it’s a scary world” (Richard).
A gendered pattern emerged: male students who received disappointing feedback tended to blame the algorithm, while female students internalised the failure, doubting their own ability. For example, Michael stated: “It’s not designed to help photographers. It’s about mathematics,” whereas Laura said: “Some days it can get you down. I can doubt myself a lot.”
Social feedback mechanism
Five of eight participants (62%) reported that social feedback (Likes, Followers, Comments) directly influenced what they posted. Michael admitted: “It just took me away from the actual work.” Richard expressed anxiety over the insatiable nature of validation: “How many is enough? If I had 1000, my new goal would be 5000. It would be never ending.” Most students felt that follower counts did not genuinely reflect talent, yet they worried that others used them as a metric.
Self-esteem and experience
Self-esteem emerged as a critical moderating factor. Students with high self-esteem either distanced themselves from Instagram or adopted a discerning approach. Those with low or defensive self-esteem deleted their accounts or made them private as emotional self-protection. Students with average self-esteem engaged most heavily, often to addictive levels, seeking reaffirmation. Alice exemplified this middle group: “Instagram is a brilliant way to get known… to get attached to something.”
Algorithms as authoritative
Although most students intellectually rejected follower count as a measure of talent, they nonetheless reported that social feedback shaped their self-evaluation. Michael noted: “It kind of makes you change your view on your work… if you don’t get as many likes as you want, you think, oh is my work not good enough?” This reveals a gap between cognitive belief and emotional response.
Expectations and the ‘palm tree effect’
Expectations directly correlated with engagement levels. Unmet expectations triggered social comparison, leading students to alter their self-presentation and creative output. One interviewee observed: “Everybody else’s different ways of seeing… really influence and change the way you do things… we lose a bit more of what makes our work unique.” This conformity pressure is what I term the ‘palm tree effect’: the formulaic repetition of imagery to the point of becoming an empty signifier, where originality is sacrificed for algorithmic relevance.
Instagram as a marketing tool
Students recognised Instagram as a “PR and press machine” (Richard), where curation now prioritises follower expectations over intrinsic creative motivation. An interviewee stated: “It’s less about the images you take, and more about how you’ve chosen to put them together… in relation to your followers.” Worries about market oversaturation and competition were universal.
Algorithmic mediation and curated content
Despite widespread awareness of algorithmic filtering, students accepted algorithmic curation as useful and logical. However, Richard described it critically as “not just a bubble but a bubble of your own thoughts.” Students had developed what Bucher (2016) terms ‘algorithmic imaginaries’, domesticating these systems into everyday professional practice.
Discussion
This study set out to explore how photography students understand, experience, and use Instagram within an algorithmically mediated culture, and the consequent effects on their professional practice. The findings confirm that Instagram’s social feedback mechanism and algorithmic mediation negatively impact most students, but the precise impact varies according to expectations, self-esteem, and professional goals.
A central tension emerged: students feel compelled to use Instagram for networking and promotion, yet many report significant psychological costs. This reflects Burbridge’s (2016) claim that self-expression and identity are now inextricably tied to professional success in a ‘like economy’. The finding that 50% of participants had either distanced themselves or deleted their accounts suggests a critical threshold of disillusionment. However, even those who remain active do so with ambivalence, echoing Deci’s (2000) reward circuitry theory: students gamble with self-worth in pursuit of dopamine-driven validation.
The relationship between self-esteem and engagement aligns with Boekaerts et al.’s (2000) self-enhancement theory. Students with lower or defensive self-esteem employed emotion-protective disengagement (avoidance or deletion), while those with average self-esteem remained caught in the feedback loop. High-self-esteem students demonstrated agency, using Instagram selectively or not at all. This suggests that Instagram does not uniformly affect users; rather, pre-existing psychological dispositions shape outcomes.
The palm tree effect: formulaic identity mediation
The ‘Palm Tree Effect’ names a previously undertheorised phenomenon: the pressure to conform to formulaic, trend-driven aesthetics in order to achieve algorithmic visibility. This directly threatens originality and authenticity, which are core values of photographic education. As one interviewee noted, students fear that unique artistic voices are being eroded. This aligns with Amabile’s work on creativity, where extrinsic constraints undermine intrinsic motivation.
The gendered pattern in attribution styles where male students blaming the algorithm, female students blaming themselves, is an unexpected but important finding. It suggests that Instagram’s feedback mechanism may reinforce or amplify existing societal patterns of self-blame and internalised criticism among women, with potential implications for mental health and professional confidence.
Students were more algorithmically literate than much of the literature suggests (Van Dijck, 2013). They understood that engagement, not image quality, drives algorithmic promotion. Yet this awareness did not translate into resistance. Instead, students continued to participate, highlighting a form of ‘critical compliance’, understanding the system’s flaws but feeling powerless to opt out without professional penalty.
Limitations
This study is limited by its small, self-selected sample (n=8) drawn primarily from one institution (LCF, UAL), which restricts generalisability. Findings are qualitative and context-specific. Future research should expand sampling across multiple institutions and disciplines, include educators and practitioners, and examine whether curriculum interventions can mitigate negative effects.
Revisiting research and literature in 2026
Since the research was conducted in 2018, I decided to revisit the literature in 2026. Kilmenka (2022) found that due to algorithmic changes, Instagram was affecting photographers’ platform performance for the ‘better’ due to the ‘threat of invisibility’and she continues to conclude that:
‘to achieve audience recognition, modern photographers need to actively participate in the race for higher metrics, which, due to the algorithmic features of Instagram management, are not guaranteed. All the professional photographers’ practices adapted for better Instagram performance, and visibility can be considered as unpaid part of the photographers’ work, that is taken for granted’ (2022).
However, I would argue that using the word ‘race’, and ‘recognition’ suggests that it becomes a contemporary part of being a photographer in the age of algorithms, where we lack agency. It reinforces my research findings where students were conforming to algorithmic incentives. This causes anxiety in photographers to adapt and a necessity to ‘keep up’ and improve performance, which is linked to medium self-esteem, causing more intense usage, and long-term side effects on mental wellbeing.
Another study (Limniou, M. et al, 2021) which is not about photographers specifically, but relevant in terms of self-esteem and likes, concluded that there is still an ongoing complex relationship with self-esteem and Instagram. That whilst frequent use of Instagram produced higher levels of self-esteem, the importance placed on ‘Likes’ had negative consequences. This suggests that the relationship continues to be complex and dependent on how the platform is used, even for adults, which reinforces that my findings in 2018 are still ongoing within the wider population in society.
Furthermore, an article published in DPreview in 2021, when the CEO of Instagram announced the introduction of video shows increased dissatisfaction as the platform develops. The articles describes how photographers felt a sense of alienation, and that the platform which had been designed for ‘photography’ wasn’t really designed for photographers and had since found solace in other platforms:
‘…is shifting toward video going forward. Feeling alienated, some photographers are moving on to Twitter to share their work and build their communities. Some are upset, and have been for awhile, that a service where they grew their business, and made a significant number of connections, has morphed into something they consider unrecognisable’.
and
‘In my eyes, Instagram stopped caring about artists and independent creators a long time ago. I have been a huge supporter of Twitter since the beginning, and found a thriving photography community here around 2019, when I began to pursue it as my primary social media outlet’, (Murphy, 2021).
Conclusion
The aim of this paper was to advance understanding of how Instagram’s social feedback mechanisms and algorithmic mediation influence photography students’ professional practice, self-expression, and identity. The findings reveal a complex, deeply psychological landscape where expectations, self-esteem, and professional goals intersect, and this hasn’t changed much across the wider society in 2026.
The original contribution of this research is the ‘palm tree effect’, a term that names the formulaic process of mediating identity through social media, whereby students sacrifice originality and authenticity to conform to algorithmic incentives. Instagram, hailed for democratising self-expression, paradoxically constrains it for those most deeply engaged with the medium.
From the interview data, three key themes emerged as having direct influence: expectations, self-esteem, and professional goals. The data revealed that self-expression operates under new conditions confined to a more formulaic process of mediating identity. Students have to compete with retrospective success as well as prospective success, where self-presentation mediates the relationship between self-criticism and an emotional response to social feedback (Jackson & Luchner, 2017).
Instagram does influence students, but not uniformly. It changes what they post, alters the direction of their work, and reshapes how they perceive themselves and others. The platform functions as a double-edged sword: offering unprecedented access and networking opportunities while generating anxiety, self-doubt, and performative conformity. It becomes ironic that a platform designed to share photography with large audiences should prove problematic for those who engage with the medium on the most profound level. As All I know is what’s on the Internet (2018) notes, Instagram ‘has replaced Kodak as the industrial powers redefining the global image economy’.
For educators, ignoring Instagram’s impact would be, as Scott (2017) argues, “an act of denial and negligence.” Photography curricula must now address algorithmic literacy, self-esteem regulation, and critical engagement with quantified social capital. Questions of authenticity, originality, and power distribution can no longer be separated from platform economics.
Finally, this study contributes to wider debates on the networked image, produsage (Manu, 2015), and the future of photography as a discipline. In an uncertain economic climate where ‘I’ has become a commodity for sale, photography courses in higher education institutions have a responsibility to equip students not only with professional knowledge but with the psychological and critical tools to navigate algorithmic culture without losing their creative voice. When considering wider debates, it remains unclear whether higher education needs to shift towards a curriculum of materiality, memory, and curation. However, what is clear is that for educators to ignore the impact of Instagram on the next generation of photographers would be an act of denial and negligence (Scott, 2017).
The full research dissertation (18,000 words) can be provided upon request.
About the author
Claudia Brookes has lectured in digital media and photography across Europe and Asia. Claudia has run a freelance photography business for over 10 years and shot for Amazon, Selvedge Magazine, and WaterAid. Claudia co-designed a fully online photography course for Royal Melbourne University (RMIT), which won 3 platinum ‘Learn X’ awards, and co-authored a book published by Springer on authentic learning, of which she was the first author. Her research interests are varied, and currently working on research focusing on an aging population and its impact on women.
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