In this micro project, Charmaine, Mun Cheng and I explored the various functions of Instagram’s story page to test out how people answer our questions. We went with the theme of asking about how people feel and if they were willing to share about their day. We used Instagram question, Instagram poll and Instagram live to gather our crowd, which was our followers from each of our accounts. The willingness to participate or answer our questions depends on how convenient it is to access these functions, and the level of privacy in which they are able to share their problems on a social platform. Instagram live provides the most viewers, as there would be a notification of the person going live to each of her followers, however, the comments and answers that participants give on the live would appear on the screen for other viewers to see as well, thus eliminating the privacy part. For question, there is more privacy as answers that participants give can only be viewed by the owner, and it is the owners choice to share that reply in public. For poll, the privacy is the same, but there is less flexibility of options to what the viewers can choose. However, there is a choice for the viewer to decide to privately message the owner to share his or her problems.
Instagram question
Some people replied by clicking the question button and their replies only appear on our story feedback page (which we can only see), while some people personally messaged us to tell us more.
Instagram Live
Full video here
We had control of the type of questions to ask and what our topic was for our Instagram audience. However, we could not control the degree of authenticity in the answers given to us by our audience and that we may not know who is sincere or not. There is a constraint towards the topic as it only centers around how they feel about their day and can only talk about events that happened to them. There are 2 ways at looking at how a limited interaction will strengthen or weaken our results. If we had limited our functions to a live session, we would have gathered many viewers to one platform, but it limits the authenticity and length of replies through the live comment session. However, limiting the interaction by using a questionaire could have gathered more lengthy replies, and hence a better understanding to why that person is feeling this particular emotion today.
In addition, as compared to a crowd-sourced work created by a single artist, using 3 accounts on the same social platform provides a larger reach towards our different followers and the flexibility to use the different functions at the same time.