on March 14 2014, when I made my first post on Instagram, I was living with my parents in Narberth, PA before getting shoulder surgery. I was doing a lot of walking around town. Instagram for me used to be a nerdy thing my mom did, to put a dreamy filter on her latte picture, but it turned into a way for me to talk to college friends a year after graduating. I was lonely ! It was also really cool to have an easy and immediate outlet for posting a photo or drawing from your phone, I had never seen that before. I was also using tumblr to post a drawing every day at that time, but this felt different and easier. this was like a photography sketchbook.
I posted mostly funny or weird things from the street for most of the first 2 years of using it
then i used it for posting about my artwork - started selling things on it. it was one of the main ways i got freelance art jobs, doing airbrush t-shirts and illustration commissions, or random film gigs.
I stopped using tumblr for my art as a result i think. it was just so easy to post stuff.
I started posting less and less on the grid, and only posting stories - it felt like a weirdly big deal to post to the grid
i stopped using it for a few weeks at a time a few times over the past few years - it was just melting my brain with too much social content and making me feel bad. i'm off it now, and might stay off forever! though I do feel like i'm missing out on stuff people are doing and making.
Instagram began development in 2010 in San Francisco as Burbn, a mobile check-in app created by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger
Kevin grew up in mass, the son of two tech parents
sort of like 4 square, "checking in" when you would go drink whiskey somewhere. whiskey!!! they pivoted to focusing on photosharing bc users liked it and foursquare was already foursquare
they had lots of investors in the first year
april 9 2012 they got purchased by facebook for $1 billion dollars 8^|