The Instagram-Facebook backlash?

As you all know, I am just massive Instagram junkie. I spend an inordinate amount of time on the service. And so do a lot of other people. Many of them are very passionate people who signed up for the service because it was anti-Facebook.

It seems like these passionate people are quite upset over finding themselves under the yoke of Mark Zuckerberg. And while no one is begrudging the good fortune of co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Kreiger, there seems to be a backlash building against the deal on the service.

One of my favorite Instagramers, Elise Marie shared a black screen in protest of the deal. There is a #instablack hash-tag that has been created to protest the deal. Clicking on #facebook on the service exposes one to even more photos expressing disappointment.

When I posted a snapshot of my own previous story, many left comments that expressed a sense of loss and hurt. “Happy for the instagram crew. Bummed though, instagram was my fb alternative. Who trusts Facebook?” wrote @emersonnh.

A long time ago, Robert Young wrote a great post about MySpace about its trouble with its community and how they felt betrayed by the service. I think we just might be starting to see similar emotions being expressed here too.

There’s a certain level of what (for the lack of a better phrase) I will refer to as cognitive dissonance when you run a business based on community. And that’s that you quickly realize that the members of the community feel strongly that the service belongs to them, and the control that you, the corporation, think you have is actually, in large part, an illusion.

After all, a community, by definition generates its own content, its own style and culture… it’s all by the people, for the people. As a result, if you’re an executive at such a company, you oftentimes feel more like a politician than a businessperson. To do anything that would suggest that you, as the corporation, owns and controls the service (and in effect, the community) is, well, akin to heresy.

As the worlds of media and technology collide with a force that can split an atom, such cognitive dissonance is a natural by-product of the fact that more and more content (and code) is being produced by the people themselves. At the same time, with the increasing digitization of media, the definition of “distribution” is also changing from channels previously rooted in the physical world to one where people themselves become the new distribution channels via tightly and loosely-coupled social networks connected together by the universal language of IP and bits.

So as time goes by, the foundation of ownership and control for content and distribution is increasingly shifting from corporate entities to people and communities. A phenomenon that will cause countless sleepless nights for old media and old-line technology leaders who don’t fully comprehend the significance of the dynamics at hand.

What Robert said in 2005 is even more valid today, except that instead of large media owners, the disruptors and social media platforms are finding themselves at a weird sport – the tail is wagging the dog.

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