The Influence of Instagram Political Literacy

KARYA#4 Karya Tulis Mahasiswa FISIP UPN Veteran Jakarta

Penulis: Faiz Akmal Rafif dan Fabian Nathaniel Putra Adya

Program Studi Ilmu Politik Angkatan 2022

Introduction 

Nowadays especially in this  globalization era, social media has  become a primary need for every  person. Social media has a lot of  functions such as communication,  spreading information, etc. All  aspects of life that connects to  technology uses social media as a  platform to do various kinds of  activities. Social media has become  attached to our daily lives and the  growth of technology will push us  more to use social media. Internet  users in indonesia is dominated by  some users in the age group of 19 to  34 years old with 49.52%, age 13 to  18 with 16,68%, and the rest are users  in the age group of 35 and above  (Katadata, 2018). This explains that  the majority of Indonesia's citizens,  especially the milennials uses social  media. 

One of the fastest emerging  social media platforms on the app  store right now is Instagram.  Instagram is an application that gives  the opportunity for users to share their  series of pictures about their moments  (Bergstrom and Backman, 2013).  Over the past ten years, Instagram has  gained millions of users for its  addicting, interactive features that  allows us to socialize in a unique,  creative way. Instagram has also  became the perfect platform for artists  to showcase their talent and works of  art and gain huge popularity from it.  Instagram has been the game changer  

for the social media industry because  its addicting and its simple to use. With every development of  times, media platforms like Instagram  are constantly changing. These  changes include new filters, features  like Insights, Stories and archives,  new ways for advertising to use  media, also changing the capacity of  the camera on mobile phones, and  more. All of this influences the  subject matter and aesthetics of any  shared images. With the growth in the  number of Instagram users from 30  million in 2012 to 300 million at the  end of 2014, Instagram has become a  valuable advertising and marketing  medium. The number of advertisers  on Instagram has increased from  200,000 in 2/2016 to one million in  3/2017. As time has progressed,  strategies for creating and running a  successful Instagram account have  been identified and described in  endless articles, blog posts, and videos (Maranovich, 2017) 

Globalization is happening  right now and many of us send  messages through all these social  media platforms and the technologies  we are offered. With social media, we  gain access to uncountable  informations spread across various  platforms. The informations we often  found have a variety of topic from  social-politics, education, health,  entertainment, etc. These  informations not only circled around  local/national field, but also the  international world. In this case, when 

we look at Instagram as our daily  social media platform, not only that  we discovered our friends' updates,  but also numerous news and  information from various subjects. 

In order to be an educated  citizen, we may have to stay in touch  by participating politics. Politics is an  activity where people create, protect,  and amend general policies in which  they live under and it can't be  detached from conflict and  cooperation (Heywood, 2013). When  we look up Instagram, we may have  experienced numerous moments  where we discovered an Instagram  post that contained a picture and a  caption about political message and  we've been in a place where we  wanted to take part in the following  issue by posting our comments and  stands about it. This is called political  participation. Political participation  can be defined as the activity of  someone or a group of people to  participate in politics actively such as  choosing state leadership and directly  or indirectly, influence the outcome  of public policy (Budiardjo, 2008). 

Participating in politics is not  only by creating or criticizing public  policies, but also developing political  literacy. Political literacy can be  defined as someone who owns  political information, knows the  process of politics such as elections,  political contributions, and  responsible as a citizen (Denver and  Hands, 2013; Krosnick, 1990).  Developing political literacy is