Although the phenomenon of social media stands for any platform that enables social networking and all of them have similar features for social engagement, Instagram remains one of the most used in the art world because of the aesthetic experience that it creates. In terms of its technical aspects, Instagram allows its users to share pictures and videos, but also to edit them before posting. Once one shares something on Instagram, it is publicly available for anyone who sees it to like, save, comment, reshare or just pass over that post. Each of these actions informs Instagram’s technology about what is interesting and engaging for each user. In his attempt of shedding more light on how Instagram works, Mosseri (2021) claims that Instagram does not have a single algorithm that controls what users see and do not see, but it rather employs a wide range of algorithms, classifiers, and processes, each with its unique set of purposes in creating the best user experience on Instagram. In a way, we can argue that Instagram, alongside other social media platforms, has the power to define value for each user by collecting more information about the user’s preferences and then shaping its experience accordingly. In this context, we are talking about the power of artificial intelligence in relation to how it shapes visual culture (Paglen, 2016). An implication is that the more information social media platforms gain from users' choices and their shared images, the more accurate their algorithms become and the more impact they have in shaping our everyday life (Paglen, 2016). In a way, by sustaining the most preferred posts, in our case representation of artworks, Instagram alongside other social media platforms seems to select for users what art is the most relevant to consume and thus sustains an individual personalised art consumption.

Furthermore, Trottier (2012) argues that by being exposed to social media’s technology, we voluntarily become the victims of surveillance. According to Trottier (2012), social media complicates relations between individuals and institutional bodies, by operating as a platform where these groups converge. By learning individuals’ needs and preferences on social media, institutions and marketers can use publicly available information to manipulate individuals’ decisions via social media (Trottier, 2012). Thus, artificial intelligence eventually serves corporate institutions and governments at the expense of information and choices made online by each individual (Paglen, 2016). In this order of ideas, it seems that social media does not only influence the way we consume art by personalising it, but also can work against us by surveilling our decisions and preferences. As a result, we are no longer in control of our art experiences on Instagram, but rather the victims of a highly automated process entitled to decide what we would like to see and experience on social media.

On the other hand, in terms of how technology can influence visual culture, Manovich (2013) claims that the transition from analogue to digital technology has transformed our experience of digital media according to each software’s properties. So, whenever we deal with digital representations, we should keep in mind that the software interfaces and properties are the ones that enable us to access and further interact with those media. In the context of displaying art on Instagram, as well as on other social media platforms, we are talking about the specific visual design rendered by each of these platforms when representing a specific media. Furthermore, the way we experience a digital representation is determined by the software’s functions (Manovich, 2013). For example, Instagram allows us to zoom in on images, but not to download them, thus our experience is limited. On the other hand, on Facebook, we can save images to our computer and then see them in another software context. In relation to this, Buhler (2015) suggests that our experience of digital representations is characterised by a multiplicity of alternative visual forms determined by the variety of software types and devices. Furthermore, according to the artist Altmann (2015, p.250), digital images are defined by their connections to the platform’s content and, as a result, the image is part of a "swarm," rather than a solitary entity. Applying this idea to Instagram’s framework, we can notice that a posted image becomes one part of the larger design of an account page. Although the image can be seen individually, its connection to the other images inevitably impacts our experience.

In the end, it is important to acknowledge that once social media has become one of the main places for consuming art, we should be more aware of how it can influence our experience in order not to become the victims of its controlling and surveilling force.

Written by Vera Doarme, 2022