Hyderabad: “In the making”, a campaign of sorts organised by social media giant Instagram (India), was held at People’s Plaza here, garnering a significant crowd over the weekend.
The campaign was an attempt to put the virtual platform of Instagram out into the city and see how the experiment works to connect Hyderabadis to their beloved Instagram celebrities. Aside from celebrating influencers, who embody a major chunk of social media culture, the campaign also gave a platform to artists to showcase their art to the audience.
Speaking to Siasat.com, multi-disciplinary artist Abhedya Bhagwan found the campaign to be a thoroughly enjoyable experience. “Especially considering how the culture scene in Hyderabad has been dormant for a while, this event was enjoyable and proved to be a great learning curve for me,” he adds.
The charm of the event was perhaps in redirecting something enmeshed in digital culture to an outside space and getting people to experience Instagram in a real world scenario.
“Like Instagram, people just got to do their thing and it was light-hearted but highly engaging,” says Abhedya.
While the reel culture on Instagram has been dubbed trivial by a lot of people, it is also important to note that Instagram and its relatively unknown users have harnessed reels to showcase their work to the world.
As Varun Dhopeshwarkar, (a member of the hip-hop group Royal Style Unit) remarks, “Reels are a medium and like all mediums they are harnessed either for good art or to showcase bad content.”
“In my experience however, reels have become a fantastic medium to get a sense of how the dance community inside and out of social media has evolved. A person sitting in Brazil can watch a dance performance of mine just because of reels,” he adds.
Irrespective of whether we like it or not, the charm of reels (and of Instagram) has taken over our digital landscape and with campaigns like “In the making” it has started to percolate into our real world as well. But if the 2000 people attending the event is anything to go by, there is a community building aspect to Instagram which cannot be ignored.
The “In the making” campaign was also organised at Chandigarh, Ahmadabad and Bangalore.