Breaking Social Media Norms Assignment

For my first attempt at breaking social media norms I chose to do my own idea rather than something from the list. This week I talked to two strangers on instagram through the messaging feature. The way that I personally use instagram, which as far as I know is the same as most other people, is the newsfeed on the mainpage that keeps me updated on what the people I follow have been posting recently. I also sometimes comment and tag friends in posts I see and I also post photos myself. I never use the messaging feature on purpose. A recent update to instagram that actually frustrates me is that when you tag someone in a comment the comment automatically becomes a message and you have to physically press a button to opt out of the automatic message feature. Because of this update I have accidentally sent messages to friends on instagram a few times. Each time my friends had a chuckle at my mistake because in our opinion messaging on instagram just isn't something that we do ever. We don't message on instagram because there are already so many other apps that are more suited to messaging such as facebook's messenger app or groupme. Furthermore, as a girl on instagram the instagram inbox is usually only messages from men that you don't know trying to start up a conversation. I think as a result my friends and I have also developed an association with instragram messaging as being a little creepy.

For this assignment I responded to a message from a stranger in my inbox and I also messaged someone that I follow on instagram that I do not know. I attempted to keep the conversation going and kept asking probing questions to learn more about the other person's life but both conversations died out rather quickly after I got past basic how are you doing questions. As the conversations went on the responses from the other person became shorter and shorter and they seemed to lose interest in the conversation. I think that for the person who messaged me first he had not expected me to actually respond and try to get to know him the way I did. For the person I messaged out of the blue I think that he in general was just being polite in responding to my message and giving me bare minimum answers so as to not be rude by not answering. Though I can not assume what they thought about the conversation, I feel that the briefness of their responses towards the end and the lack of depth to the conversations suggest that they also do not understand instagram as an application on which to converse at length with people, particularly people that they do not know. It was weird but also interesting being the "creepy" person messaging strangers rather than being the recipient during this assignment. For the second attempt at breaking social media norms I will try messaging a stranger or "friend" on facebook that I don't really know in person and see if the response is any different than the response I got on instragram.