Phone Eats First Ireland Headrick • Nonfiction
A pancake breakfast-in-bed featuring a Daniel Wellington watch and miniature jars of berry compote. Boba milk tea with extra pearls, no ice. Cinnamon-flavored kombucha sipped from a biodegradable straw, crimson lips puckered into a plump little bow. Blood orange granola with oat flakes in the shape of the sun. The rise of Instagram has brought the art of food styling out from the shadows of the Food Network and into the hands of the masses. What was once cringe-inducing millennial behavior is now the bread and butter of influencers around the world: a perfectly styled shot, creative in concept and delicious in execution, featuring colors so vivid and stylized (re: filtered) that they make viewers’ mouths water with envy and delight. It’s a new type of currency: Instagram gold. Users are enchanted by the idea of social media popularity outside of their immediate circle of friends, so they learn the ropes of the platform and use it to their advantage. The Instagram algorithm—a dumbed-down catch-all for how the app organizes content in user’s feeds—exists to serve us the posts we are most likely to engage with, first. But this, of course, is only theoretical.
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