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Livestream: Sarah Frier on "No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram"

5:00pm sharp to 6:00pm EST livestream

Event Details

Speaker Series

Date: Thursday January 28, 2021 | 05:00 PM - 06:00 PM
Speaker(s): Sarah Frier, Reporter, Bloomberg News; Author

In Conversation with: Aleksandra Sagan, Vancouver correspondent, The Logic
Topic: "No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram" (Simon & Schuster, 2020) - FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2020
Venue: The link to the livestream is included in the email confirmation you receive after you register.
Location: Online
Cost: $37.00 + HST per person (includes the link to the livestream and 1 hardcover copy of "No Filter" which will be shipped to customers after the event)
Register Now
Book Synopsis: Winner of the 2020 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award * Named “Best Book of the Year” by FortuneThe Financial TimesThe Economist, Inc. Magazine, and NPR.

In this “sequel to The Social Network” (The New York Times), award-winning reporter Sarah Frier reveals the never-before-told story of how Instagram became the most culturally defining app of the decade.

“The most enrapturing book about Silicon Valley drama since Hatching Twitter” (Fortune), No Filter “pairs phenomenal in-depth reporting with explosive storytelling that gets to the heart of how Instagram has shaped our lives, whether you use the app or not” (The New York Times).
 
In 2010, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a photo-sharing app called Instagram, with one simple but irresistible feature: it would make anything you captured look more beautiful. The cofounders cultivated a community of photographers and artisans around the app, and it quickly went mainstream. In less than two years, it caught Facebook’s attention: Mark Zuckerberg bought the company for a historic $1 billion when Instagram had only thirteen employees.

That might have been the end of a classic success story. But the cofounders stayed on, trying to maintain Instagram’s beauty, brand, and cachet, considering their app a separate company within the social networking giant. They urged their employees to make changes only when necessary, resisting Facebook’s grow-at-all-costs philosophy in favor of a strategy that highlighted creativity and celebrity. Just as Instagram was about to reach a billion users, Facebook’s CEO Mark Zuckerberg—once supportive of the founders’ autonomy—began to feel threatened by Instagram’s success.

Frier draws on unprecedented access—from the founders of Instagram, as well as employees, executives, and competitors; Anna Wintour of Vogue; Kris Jenner of the Kardashian-Jenner empire; and a plethora of influencers worldwide—to show how Instagram has fundamentally changed the way we show, eat, travel, and communicate, all while fighting to preserve the values which contributed to the company’s success. “Deeply reported and beautifully written” (Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair), No Filter examines how Instagram’s dominance acts as lens into our society today, highlighting our fraught relationship with technology, our desire for perfection, and the battle within tech for its most valuable commodity: our attention.

FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year 2020


About Our Speakers:  
Sarah Frier reports on social media companies for Bloomberg News out of San Francisco. Her award-winning features and breaking stories have earned her a reputation as an expert on how Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter make business decisions that affect their future and our society. Frier is a frequent contributor to Bloomberg Businessweek and Bloomberg TelevisionNo Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram is her first book.

Aleksandra Sagan is The Logic‘s Vancouver correspondent. She spent more than four years as a business reporter at The Canadian Press, where she covered technology, retail and food and agriculture. She’s broken news about the relaunch of Carrot Rewards, has covered the deployment of technology in the Canadian grocery wars, and has reported on Big Tech’s expanding Vancouver footprint. She was previously a senior writer at CBC. In 2018 she was the co-recipient of the R. James Travers Foreign Corresponding Fellowship, which saw her and a Canadian Press colleague travel to India and South Africa to report on antimicrobial resistance. Their six-part series on superbugs won the Canadian Association of Journalists’ Don McGillivray Award for best investigative piece.

 

Questions: events@rotman.utoronto.ca, Megan Murphy, (416) 978-6122


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