Week 10 I begin interviewing Students for my project. My first two interviews were with seniors at Bowdoin. Both participants noted that they originally got Instagram around middle school because their friends and school peers were on it. My first participant noted a shift in how she engages with Instagram now as a senior in comparison to her first year. In her first year she had a second Instagram account, a “finsta” (fake Instagram). She used to post more “silly” content on this and the page was only followed by close friends. She explained that now she is not as close with her friends from home who primarily followed the account and has stopped posting on it. She also describes that now she posts more landscape and scenic photos of places she goes to as opposed to posting pictures with or of people. This prompted me to ask why this shift happened and she responded that she doesn’t view herself as photogenic and avoids posting individual photos of herself. I was interested in this because it implicates that on some level she cares about what people see on her page. This differed from my second participant who said that he shares individual photos in a more joking way. He describes it as both “self objectifying and funny”. My second participant also made a fascinating comment on how he chooses to present class on Instagram. He noted that he is very aware of how he expresses class on instagram and avoids sharing photos from vacations or extravagant events. He says that this is also in part of the fact that he doesn’t like his personal life being broadcasted on the app.
A particular challenged I faced while conducting interviews was that sometimes participants answers to certain questions were shorter than I would like. I found myself asking follow up question to pull more information out of them. I am interested to see how my next set of interviews go and compare answers between my first two. My next steps are to continue interviewing and finding more sources.