Virginia Heffernan praises the image-sharing site for emphasizing our visual lives:
Now that superstylized images have become the answer to “How are you?” and “What are you doing?” we can avoid the ruts of linguistic expression in favor of a highly forgiving, playful, and compassionate style of looking. When we live only in language—in tweets and status updates, in zingers, analysis, and debate—we come to imagine the world to be much uglier than it is. But Instagram, if you use it right, will stealthily persuade you that other humans—and nature, and food, and three-dimensional objects more generally—are worth observing for the sheer joy of it. This little app has delivered a gorgeous reminder, one well worth at least $1 billion: Life is beautiful, and it goes by fast.
(Screenshot from Instagram’s blog, where the tag #WHPdearphotograph “asked participants to take an old film photograph or antique postcard from the past, hold it up against the original setting and then take a picture of it.”)
The Dish 