Happy Birthday Instagram

Happy Birthday Instagram

WORDS BY CLARE MAUNDER

I have an on-off relationship with Instagram. At times we’ve been deeply in love and utterly inseparable, documenting each other’s moments (did it really happen if there aren’t any pictures?) and talking into the early hours. Currently though, we’ve been on a break since December. Since then I’ve been witness to my own rebirth into a life outside the confines of an app that has both shaped and been shaped by my identity for near to a decade. If the metaphor of rebirth sounds overly dramatic, perhaps a retrospective glance over the previous decade of Instagram’s growth is needed for a full reality check of how we came to this cyborg-esque place of app codependency.

Instagram celebrated its tenth birthday back in October. Founded by Stanford graduate Kevin Systrom in 2010, it’s packed a lot into its first decade of life - it’s the fourth most downloaded app of the 2010s, and has an estimated value of $102 billion. During this time the platform has steadily amassed other auxiliary functions to supplement its central photo-sharing mission - direct messaging, stories, live features, and reels are now part of its collective weaponry. What these channels have in common is a sense of connection, each a different language for users to employ at will. But Instagram doesn’t run on the metrics of fluffy concepts like friendship and authentic closeness. It runs on the quantifiable metric of profit, which it absorbs through the attention economy. Every second of usage the app squeezes from you is more money to line the app’s pockets. The fantasy we might light to swaddle ourselves in of Instagram’s existence to provide a space to explore the contours of friendship and self-expression online crumbles. This is something I think often gets forgotten when navigating the channels of social media. Or, in my case, an awareness that these technologies are designed to cleave attention away from my life and instead pour it into neat square boxes on an app, which has a palliative effect that absolves me of the shape of responsibility. I no longer have to bear the weight of managing my own time on devices and apps with the nihilistic end-point of what they’re designed, and designed very well, to do.

Instagram’s Systrom seems an alright guy - he seems to have sidestepped the evil corporate villain mould Zuckerberg fills out so well. But even so, he admitted in an interview with Silicon Valley journalist Kara Swisher that we’re at a stage where we know that social media works, but that we don’t know how it works. I wonder who decides the criteria of success that is used in this model. Odds on, it’s not the users of the app.

‘Social life not social media’ and ‘love not likes’ are phrases which might circulate the upper layers of consciousness when navigating Instagram and other platforms, but I wonder how deeply we believe the things that we say. I’m frequently amazed, and a little worried, by the mental gymnastics my brain performs to convince myself the photos and profiles I’m consuming are real, despite knowing they’re both constructed and curated. Instagram and social media don’t trade on the language of rationality though, and much of those well-intentioned messages are dissolved by the time the conversation has moved past paying lip-service to the relationship between social media and ‘real life’. We’re living in an age of an overwhelming number of channels to communicate with anyone and everyone around us, but let’s not confuse communication with connection, especially if the communication is not a two-way, but a three-way channel. This puts a new spin on the ‘three’s a crowd’ idiom - social media has muscled its way into the intimacy of individual friendships, a silent voyeur we forget is there.

Instagram has subsumed the world quietly, almost insidiously so. In 2019 it developed an option to allow users to complete in-app purchases; Instagram’s got the whole world in its hands. It’s now entirely possible to live out a life through their channels of communication, or, maybe, because of their channels of communication. Memory works differently in immaterial spaces. Clear physical signs of development and change are replaced by background system updates and font changes that are quickly forgotten by collective memory. Instagram’s replacement of their vanguard brown polaroid camera icon with a minimalist multicoloured indication of a camera registers as nothing more than a dim memory. It seems it’s always looked this way because on the internet things aren’t memorialised in the same way as the material world. The real world becomes untethered from the world Instagram presents to us as reality. A world without Instagram registers instead as an unsubstansive day-dream, as a memory we might have dreamed up before drifting off to sleep.

I give myself one month before I fall back in love with Instagram again.