Seven Sins of Instagram (Under Construction)

Overview

How might we inform millennials about the negative ways Instagram impacts their behaviors, relationships, and well-being? We framed our response through the lens of the “Seven Deadly Sins”, examining topics of behavior change, morality, and social pressure caused by Instagram. We created a photo series to visualize and communicate our research findings.

Each sin is represented by three square images. The first image shows our visual interpretation of the sin. The second image contains a quote we received from campus interviews and a workshop we ran to more closely understand people’s relationships and habits with Instagram. The third image features a write-up about why the sin relates to Instagram and how it has affected us as a society along with our relationships, supported by excerpts from academic studies.

Project Team

I partnered with Communication Design studio classmates: Juliana Nam, Kevin Gao, and Emily Mongilio.

Duration

This project took around a semester to complete and was done as my graduating thesis.

Impact & Reflections

We uploaded our photo series to Instagram in hopes of getting the message across to friends and strangers as they interact directly with the social media platform. Our hope was that someone might stumble across this series mid-scroll and stop to reconsider their relationship to Instagram. We also invited people to share personal anecdotes with us. Did the images resonate with them?

After a few days, we were surprised to see that we had received a message from an Instagram influencer with 17.5k followers. In our inbox, we found a handwritten quote from her, copying the style we used in our work. She shared with us that she makes a living by posting about brands and products to her followers. We began a conversation back and forth where she told us that our project helped her see how warped her sense of self and career has become as a result of being popular on Instagram. We were touched to know that our project had made a difference for her, changing how she hopes to interact with social media going forward.

Given everything that we know and that has been published about Instagram, it is still your choice how to use this social media platform. Instagram has become a place for people to share highlights. Feeds are filled with overly curated and stylized images of people at their best moments. We hope that this project gets people to think about Instagram in a different manner and notice how it has impacted their lives outside their phones.

Full details and documentation will be posted soon!