Letter From The Editor

When it comes to new social media, I’m always a bit of a late-comer.

I was among the last of my friends to finally sign up for MySpace in high school (I was still clinging to my Xanga page, which I filled with angsty teen poetry). Living in the dorms in college, I was the only one who didn’t have a Facebook — until a dorm-mate made one for me. And it was the end of 2014 by the time I finally got an Instagram — and even then, it was only at the insistence of my co-workers, who had begun tagging photos of us with #getadamninstagramalreadychristina to chide me into it.

But now, Instagram has by far become my favorite form of social media, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. It seems to me that people have become far more active on Instagram (or Snapchat, so I hear) than Facebook or Twitter.

What do we all find so compelling about Instagram? I think that it allows us to peer, sometimes very intimately, into the lives of our friends, our acquaintances, and the people we creep on surreptitiously while hoping we don’t accidentally like a photo of theirs from 152 weeks ago. We get to see what they ate for lunch, how they spent Friday night, what their desk looks like. We get to see all these things — even if it’s a very polished version.

These days, there are a bunch of bona fide Instagram stars — and Hawaii has produced its fair share of them. So this week, we chatted with a few local Instagrammers who have large followings to find out what they use Instagram for, how they’ve built their following, and how they go about putting together a post.

For more, see page 6.