WELCOME TO ‘SCROLL HOLES’ PART 1 OF I’M NOT REALLY SURE HOW MANY BECAUSE I HAVE A LOT OF THOUGHTS.
The year is 2012 and I don’t care who knows it: I LOVE Instagram. All my friends are on it, curating my grid feels like a fun little puzzle, and it’s a great way to *Madonna voice* express myself. Let’s see, it’s 2012, so I’m probably in my white border phase, I’ve moved on from Hipstamatic and use PicFX to edit the shit out of my photos. There are no ads, Stories, Lives, or DMs and influencers are just now beginning their horrific ascent into our feeds. You can surmise who’s sleeping with who, who’s breaking up, getting together, etc. all based on who’s liking what — it’s like our very own Entertainment Tonight, produced in realtime. And with each new post, I feel like I’m adding a brick to the building that is my personality — and I’m building a cool, artistic, 20-something who, like, only uses #hashtags ironically guys!!
OK now the year is 2020, which you may recognize from such things as global pandemic and the demise of democracy as we know it. For quite some time now, the consensus is that social media sucks and we all totally hate it. For sure, for sure. I parroted this sentiment many times, but I never changed my behavior. I kept scrolling, posting, liking, commenting, DM-ing, stalking my ex and his new girlfriend’s sister’s dog and uhh yeah you get the picture. And you can probably relate. But there’s been a shift within me — and with a lot of my friends as of late.
Nothing about it feels good anymore. It no longer feels like something I’m doing because I enjoy it, but rather something I have to do. Side note: I am a social media professional so technically I do have to do it, but now even my personal social media feels like something you’d have to pay me to do. When I go on Instagram these days, it’s hard to find anything that feels additive to my life. I can’t think of the last time Instagram made me a happier, better, or more informed person.
Moreover, I’ve begun to feel decidedly icky about what I share. And the motives behind it. I understand that there’s a dopamine response and you feel temporarily loved when the likes come in, but why… why would I feel the need for people to always be thinking of me? To see my little picture in the top row of their Story bar? Like me, like me, like me.
I recently took a trip to Catalina with my mom. It was beautiful, she is beautiful, we had a great time and I took a lot of photos that would look stellar on my feed. But I don’t want to share them with anyone. It feels performative. Why do I care if you care that I took a trip to Catalina? Would a photo of my mom getting over 100 likes make my day better? The whole thing, it just feels… icky.
There’s the obvious assertion that people are logging on less and less because Instagram is turning into Facebook; that it’s moved too far past its humble beginnings as a straight-forward photo sharing platform. But to me, this feels like the beginning of something bigger. It feels, and this is my sincere hope, that it has less to do with the platform itself and more to do with the fact that we’re all getting disenchanted with social media as a whole.
More on this later. Gonna go search eBay for a Blackberry.