Yoga on Instagram

YogaAnonymous tells us: "A picture might be worth a thousand words, but in the world of yoga on Instagram, a photo could mean a whole new career."
http://yoganonymous.com/yoga-instagram-turned-lucrative-business/

Yoga itself has been a lucrative business since it hit these shores in force--for some people with certain ambitions. In cases, it's gone multinational. The Starbucks story might soon be applied, for example, to the Paul and Sonia Tudor-Jones' corporatized luxury "Jois" studios, which have moved in next to the humbler original students of Jois himself. So the "lucrative business" angle is nothing new. Instagram and other social media are potentially revolutionary social media technologies--witness the Arab Spring. Careful. If the medium is the message, then one major internet capability is to efficiently commoditize anything and suck us consumers into its vortex. So, perhaps Yoga photos might be a "lucrative business." Do we yet have criteria for evaluating them, not to mention their business model? I would want to go on a case by case basis. Can any of us look at just one more Bikram speedo photo shot against a background of 500 sweaty bodies or 40 Rolls Royces? The gorgeous Equinox YouTube videos are as notable for their magisterial poses as they are for their soft-core porn allusions. On the flip side, the communicative and community-building possibilities of the internet offer to (mostly) women and very small businesses the possibility not only to survive and flourish, to surprise us with gorgeous poses and individual creativity we thought not possible, and to offer some visual competition to the daily round of bears driving cars, drunken teens, and wardrobe malfunctions. As well, from this new marketplace of Yoga photos, we can sharpen our criteria for discriminating good poses and virtuous teachers from bad snapshots and crass propaganda. So much out there begs the attention--especially of wide-eyed new students. If we potentially benefit from a grand visual array of beckoning photographs, would we not also benefit from a public exchange as to what content makes us the Yogis we want to be?