Spencer Beacock takes on those who criticize Instagram as “bad art” in Instagram, Emotional Metadata & Ubiquitous Sharing. He starts by redefining the purpose of the photo-sharing service:
Instagram is a tool and a model for easy, non-verbal sharing of experiential and emotional data. It is image-capturing for pseudo-ethnographic recording, rather than image-capturing for beauty or composition.
His take on the much-discussed filters is really interesting as well:
Like a regular photograph, the base data is visual data. However, unlike a traditional photograph, Instagram captures all of the regular metadata and then goes one step further, giving people the opportunity to assign emotional metadata about their experiences, in the form of its seventeen different filters.
The filters are visual representations of all of the other sensory and emotional data that gets connected with the images in our minds.
Spencer gives some great examples of what he means by this, and then closes the piece with a discussion of Instagram’s role in identity creation.