Social Media Pandemic
I saw a couple Instagram posts last night with the caption “until tomorrow,” and wondered which quasi-political virtue-signalling campaign this could be promoting. A quick Google, however, informed me that it was a silly trend of posting an “embarrassing” photo of yourself for 24 hours. Why, I wondered, not just do this as a story, which already disappears after a day on its own? My question was answered when I tossed a casual like to one post and promptly received a message:
Great. Another Instagram trend born out of quarantine, same as the chains of poorly drawn fruit and videos doing push-ups on your dirty bedroom carpet. I wasn’t going to post, but then I thought ehhhhhh, there is this one fire selfie I took that I can play off as “embarrassing.” Maybe I can get some free likes, why not? This experience, I’m sure, is relatively similar to anyone else who got roped in. I, however, couldn’t be assed to send the message to everyone who liked my pic.
The way people are suddenly utilizing social media, especially Instagram, strikes nostalgia of the platform pre-2016. People no longer care about likes or even content; it’s more about the act of communicating and less about the response. And influencers? They’re slowly stagnating as they come to grips with life indoors.
It’s odd, we’re suddenly acting like we have a disgusting amount of time on our hands, but I’m not sure we do. Every student with a MacBook sits with iMessage open all class, anyway. Anyone working in a cubicle farm is texting their friends or refreshing Instagram when their boss (who is likely doing the same) isn’t looking. Maybe it’s because you miss your friends, you can’t see them in person, can’t get up to the same shenanigans. But we have more video call services than I can count, online gaming, and, of course, the group chat (saved my life)— all of which are a lot closer to real social interaction than a chain of 50 people attempting to draw an orange.
I think, more than anything, people are doing this because they’re scared. They’re being told the world is ending— that, right or wrong, they should be spending more time on social media. When you suddenly can’t get trashed on Yellow Tail in some sorority house off campus, you scramble to find the next quickest form of engagement and solidarity with your people, lame as it might be.
When all this quarantine business started, I was optimistic. This could be our return to long form blogs and novels. We could all be streaming indie films in a post movie theater world. And my twitter could be a constant feed of tl;dr’s on Wall Street Journal and NYT articles as the internet embraces content with substance, rather than mere content for the sake of content. I think that, sadly, my boomer dad is right: our attention spans are nonexistent. We prefer to spend our time doing a dozen Instagram “challenges” to kill three whole minutes and two brain cells, and then we spend the rest of the day complaining that we’re bored and refreshing for notifications.
After nearly two out of who knows how many weeks of hardly leaving the house, my optimism is waning. As badly as I want to return to my usual lifestyle, I think the only solution to the increasingly contagious Instagram challenge is this quarantine lasting long enough that even the smoothest brains on the internet get bored of these hollow activities and turn to something more intellectually stimulating, if not away from the internet altogether. In a time when it feels like we may be approaching peak social media, maybe we just need this boredom bubble to burst. How many more celebrities do we need to watch do 10 push-ups before we close the ‘gram and open a book? This momentary global pause gives us an opportunity to relax, create, and explore areas and topics we might normally not have time for. If you asked yourself a month ago how you would spend your day if time suddenly stopped, would you sit around drawing bad cartoon fruit on your phone? Posting intentionally bad pictures of yourself just to pull them down the next day? Filming yourself dancing a dance you didn’t create to a song you don’t know? With as much art, film, literature, etc. as time normally prevents us from enjoying, lets not be so quick to exhaust all of the low-hanging garbage content— if we’re in this thing for the long haul, we might need to keep those on ice for later.
