ABSTRACT
Since its launch in San Francisco in October 2010, Instagram-a social media photography application for smartphones-has garnered over 100,000 million monthly active users. By March 2014 over 20 billion photographs had been shared on the platform, with roughly 60 million images being uploaded each day, and 1.6 billion expressions of “like.”1 No wonder the platform was purchased by Facebook for approximately $300 million in 2012. The overwhelming scale of Instagram seems to prevent, even resist, many kinds of analysis. How can we talk about style, genre, aesthetics, or even meaning, in the context of millions of users and billions of photographs? How can such a global phenomenon be inflected with an aesthetics or politics of the local? With the conundrum of scale interfering with our usual analytic categories, what frameworks can we use to make sense of Instagram, and what are the implications for the methodologies of digital ethnography? While Big Data has become a seductive frame within which to develop new theories of scale, and more specifically to develop new techniques of visualization to analyze social media images (e.g. Manovich et al. 2012), in this chapter I argue that thinking of Instagram using the language and frame of the archive enables us to develop an analytic perspective that might make sense of either a single image or the multitude, understanding this proliferation of images through a new institutional lens.
