April 19, 2012
Use Instagram? Congratulations! You are now a user of yet another of the products and applications owned by the Facebook Corporation. For those of you who do not know what Instagram is—which would be bizarre since it is so widely used by college students—it is a photo-sharing, social networking app that allows you to take and edit photos using several different filters and effects.
Instagram is a free app, without any advertisements and virtually no generative source of income. Instagram’s widespread use by about 30 million people, and its innovative idea infiltrating the virtual world, led it to be valued at $500 million prior to Facebook’s acquisition—half of what Facebook ended up paying. In light of Facebook’s continuous attempts to out-do competitors like Google, their purchase of Instagram is unsuprising. The shocking aspect of this takeover, however, is that Instagram generates no revenue whatsoever.
A billion dollars for a company that generates zero revenue, has 13 employees and maintains a huge base of users—this seems rather crazy in good and bad ways. Personally, I think that it is great that investors have faith in the role of the individual as an innovator, as exemplified in the social media revolution. Additionally, it shows just how much small businesses affect our market and daily lives.
But are we putting too much faith in the virtual world? I would agree with the notion that sites like Facebook have had many positive implications on our lives. However, I also think that the blind use of social tools like Facebook and LinkedIn leads us down a slippery slope towards losing more of our privacy and anonymity.
Every time you swipe a credit card, make a phone call, send an email your actions are tracked. Facebook is infamous for tracking these types of actions, in that each article you read on the New York Post or Washington Post is tracked on your newsfeed, each song you listen to on Spotify is listed and tucked away between the panels of your “Timeline,” each status update is put in a chronological order, often tagged with a certain location. Though you must give these applications permission to access your information, it is often impossible to use them without doing so; there isn’t much of a choice. Moreover, think about all of the files your computer automatically saves when you search the Internet; do you not find it bizarre that advertisements on Facebook are tailored to anything you’ve ever “liked” on Facebook?
Now that Facebook has acquired Instagram, it is no question that the application will be tweaked and engineered to fit the mold of uniformity that defines Facebook’s software. Each picture we take will be geotagged with our location, each status we update we post will reveal information that most would like to keep private. Our demands to further simplify the world of the Internet are putting our autonomy and our privacy at stake, while also potentially harming our self-image.
Since we now live in a virtual world—a place where we can be or appear to be whoever we want—is the emphasis we place on virtual communication really worth the risk of losing more of our anonymity? Each move we make, article we read, song we listen to, and comment we post is under scrutiny, and therefore, we must be more careful about how we express, present and carry ourselves. And with Facebook’s acquisition of Instagram, this trend will only continue to grow.
Next time someone uploads a photo depicting questionable behavior, think about how the logging of that information may impact his or her pursuits in years to come. At one point in this country’s history—and some still contend this point nowadays—it was big government that was thought to be an overbearing, evil force creeping its way up on the people. But now, it’s private actors, such as corporations, websites and other mediums of virtual communication, that are finding out information as fast as we log in to our Facebook. As we overvalue the social networking phenomena—which I do admit has benefited us in many ways—we continue to slowly sacrifice our privacy in favor of immediate gratification.