The Homogeneity of Instagram Travel Photos (opens in new tab)

I read one bit of utopian fiction where the propagation of digital production was limited to a nearby social circle. That way, people weren't constantly comparing their photographs with the best photographer in the world, or their musical compositions with the best musician in the world. People would specialize and create things, but for the benefit of their social circle, not the entire world. I wonder if something like that, but for Instagram, might be worth considering.

While it is indeed true that humans share a large number of traits that naturally homogenize, to an extent, how we think and act, I'd bet it is ultimately Instagram's interconnectedness between users which favors this kind of content replication. Quantifying social validation by means of like, comment, and follower counts make other users' reactions predictable and, thus, exploitable; I think people who take this kind of hackneyed photos or videos are doing so because they have been proven to work--they already have feedback for that kind of aesthetic and narrative artifices, because they have already been posted by popular accounts and have gotten good results.

If you take photos to remember something then you can have a lot of unique photos. While everyone else is chasing the perfect photo you'll have something that is actually true to the memory.

the comments here are alarmingly h... well you know the rest.

Sources please.

I think this type of work is much better evidence for the claim of cultural homogeneity from the article: The photo series are all taken within short time windows of a couple of hours in the same location.

Instagram on the other hand contains billions of pictures from multiple locations taken over long periods of time. It is only natural to find some repetition and much harder to argue how much of that repetition can be attributed to lack of creativity.

...and even more amazing one by Ari Versluis (also Dutch): http://www.exactitudes.com

I imagine if someone built Instagram for ancient Greek art and analysed it they could rediscover things like the Golden Ratio. And those Doric columns... all the same.

And with photography much of it isn't mimicry per se so much as the fact that humans find a lot of similar things interesting even if they pay no attention to other people's artwork at all. Even if entirely uninterested in other people's travel shots, people often find the rowing boat trip they took with their partner interesting enough to record a picture of their partner taken from said rowing boat, and so we end up with a lot of shots of partners sitting in the prow which can't really not be compositionally similar to other shots of other partners sitting in other boats on other rivers.

This comment made my day. :)

It has more to do with the fact that most humans are social and cultural mimics, and genuine creativity is rare - and not always welcome when it appears.

Could it have anything to do with the sheer volume and accessibility of 'art' in the modern world? There was a time where thousands of people had to favor an artist/photographer's style in order for them to rise to prominence. Nowadays with people scrolling through hundreds or thousands of Instagram posts a day and voting with their thumbs, the barriers to entry into the 'art' world are much lower.

As an artist I find looking at art on a phone sized device nauseating. I think the size of the ultimate image makes creating homogeneous images much more likely as you can only see the barest hint of detail, even on a retina screen. Seurat's famous A Sunday on La Grande Jatte is an enormous painting, but seeing it on small screen makes it look like a comic.

We do that here too. Think of when people bring up the phrase "if it's free then you are the product." The first few times it's seen by people, they think that's a great way to describe what they're seeing, and it spreads like wildfire. Now it's to the point I groan when I inevitably see it during a discussion.

This is really just the propagation of ideas which have sex: https://www.wired.co.uk/article/ideas-having-sex-matt-ridley...

In an attempt to appear unique, everyone ends up doing the same thing.

Instagram is just a reflection of what society does in real life. This is visible in fashion, hair styles, beard, and whatever is the trend now.

I personally don’t understand why so many people have this need to look like their peers. Does anyone with more social skills have an explanation?

It's like she's got the exact same expression on her face in every picture. It's almost doll-like.

And if I hadn't been looking for the joke, I'd have done a double take, because it does look exactly like a real account from a distance.

The author is struggling with the fact that humans are overwhelmingly a mimicry bunch.

Personally I don't think there's anything wrong with it, it's the only way there can be billions of people. The automation & cloning process when it comes to personality, choices, behavior, likes, dislikes, etc. saves an incredible amount of time at scale.

30 minutes spent reading comments on Reddit or Imgur for example reveals that almost everybody is copying everybody else on there. You see witty lines, factoids, memes, repeated ad nauseam for years. The moment someone comes up with something new, it's immediately copied for hopeful points (attention and validation of existence; I think those things lacking is a serious and common issue for most people, which is why it works so well as a system in communities).

Imagine if everyone on Reddit, to post something, had to be original. 99%+ of the site instantly disappears. The effort or type of brain required to come up with new, very entertaining memes for example. Humanity wouldn't get anything else done if that much originality was required of all things, it's a division of labor applied to social everything.

There's nothing to be alarmed about. In my opinion most people have nothing interesting or original to contribute (by default I think it would have to be that way), so they copy everything from the more interesting tiny minority and it gets passed down the chain in a cascade of mimic. Most of humanity is a lifestyle and behavior clone top to bottom. Humanity is a tribe of organized copying, passing down what works from one person to the next to save time.

It takes either a particularly outstanding character/personality/thinking abnormality, or a large amount of effort, to do something original when the composition comparison is a billion other people.

One could say the same about HN comments. ;)