“I am logged into an Instagram account, identical to the one you are in now. I am posting a photograph and I am going to screen-shot and repost it again and again until the compression artefacts of the algorithm reinforce themselves so that any semblance of the photo, with perhaps the exception of pattern, is destroyed. What you will see, then, is the algorithm of Instagram articulated by photography. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my photo might have.”
Click through for the slow degradation of the image quality and utilize this as a reminder that the use of social media tools, apps, widgets are fun but their sold purpose is to deliver content to billions of people easily and most of those billions are using slow aging wireless data networks and phones with limited computational resources so compression is a huge aspect to the modern web.
When you are capturing your baby’s first steps, don’t use Facebook’s app to capture the video and upload and then delete the video from your device. In fact, don’t leave it only on your phone….back it up to a computer that has an off-site storage (like BackBlaze) and only save the original version. If you upload to Facebook and then years later, use a tool to download the video from Facebook, you’re getting much less quality than the original video and there’s a chance they may not have the video anymore. Facebook, like any company can go out of business and your memories are gone forever.
Instant sharing is great but nothing beats having multiple digital copies of the original media.