Читать книгу Instagram - Tama Leaver, Crystal Abidin - Страница 19

While GIFs (short animated images) have a much longer history than Instagram, having been very popular on the early web, they were for a time quite uncommon online, only to have had a major resurgence with the popularity of reaction GIFs, both standalone, on tumblr, and, significantly, embedded into many popular platforms, including Twitter and Facebook (Highfield & Leaver 2016; Miltner & Highfield 2017). While not encoded in the GIF format, the aesthetic norms of GIFs are evident in Instagram’s Boomerang app (and Boomerang button in Stories), which captures a very short video clip which is then looped backwards and forwards. However, by late January 2018 it was clear that GIFs were an important expressive form that Instagram had not yet capitalized on, so the platform released GIF Stickers for Stories, allowing GIFs to be added to and overlaid on Instagram Stories. Like Snapchat, Instagram partnered with the company Giphy to deliver a moderated library of GIFs to Instagram users. The addition of GIF Stickers, like the Stories format itself, was clearly aimed at keeping teens and younger users on Instagram, ensuring they have the full visual social media suite of tools to express themselves.

The integration of GIFs on Instagram also shows one of the challenges in integrating third-party services and content. Just a month after the stickers were launched, Instagram quickly removed all GIFs from their platform after a highly offensive and racist GIF was found, shared and then decried on social media (Constine 2018e). A few weeks later the GIF Sticker returned to Instagram, but only after some very careful media in which Giphy took complete responsibility for the racist GIF slipping onto Instagram (and Snapchat), and promised such content would never make it through to the carefully moderated library that Giphy provides to third parties, including Instagram (Welch 2018). Giphy’s tightened moderation appears to have worked, with no notable complaints since this one incident, but this example does serve as a reminder that Instagram includes content from a range of sources and other companies and platforms, so that decisions about content are not just exercises in moderating users and their media, but also decisions about what other material to draw onto Instagram, and what to avoid. All of these decisions shape the experience and use of Instagram as a platform.