The Picture-Book Generation, Where a Picture is Worth 400 Million WordsSMU SMC

Although traditionally a picture is worth a thousand words, photo editing and sharing application, Instagram, has proven that a photo is actually worth 400 million words, or “followers,” as the site calls them.

Instagram is an online mobile photo-sharing, video-sharing and social networking service that now has over 400 million users worldwide.

This September, Instagram hit 400 million users, surpassing Twitter by a whopping 80 million. Although it has been around since 2010, Instagram’s numbers really skyrocketed over the last nine months, which is when over 100 million new members joined the platform. “So, not only is Instagram growing, it’s growing really, really quickly.”

The same cannot be said for Twitter, though, whose number of monthly active users worldwide has barely increased over the last year. The online social networking service enticed the world in 2006 with their mission, “to give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly, without barriers.” Instagram has not only fulfilled this mission, but also done so without barriers, or words. The application brings to users all that Twitter does, including news, recipes, and Kim Kardashian’s latest selfie, however without the clutter of 140 required characters. As the numbers show, this straightforward, pictures-only approach has triumphed in the social media world.

The way that our world accesses information has dwindled down from picking up a physical newspaper, to turning on a television and having the headlines read to you, to opening your laptop or iPhone to scan skimmed versions of various news outlets’ stories, to condensing breaking news into 140 characters, to simply looking at pictures. Is our generation proving that a picture truly is worth a thousand words, or is it that our multi-tasking, short attention-spanned generation simply prefers a picture over 140 characters?