The Black Hole
I’ve been thinking of myself as someone rather critical of social media. At the same time, I am active on some, fueled by the idea that it makes professionl sense for me to use them. I use Twitter and Instagram for discovery (or rather, that’s the idea), and I use Twitter as an attempt to make up for the absence of people relying on RSS to follow my blog. In terms of RSS, if you don’t know what that is, don’t worry. If you do, it’s likely you’re mourning its absence along with me. If you know what it is, you might say I should use Facebook, too. People – including friends – have told me that. I did have a Facebook account years ago, but I decided to delete it (and that was even before it emerged to what extent the kraken shreds your privacy there): the site was just too creepy and inane for me. Obviously, I’m using on Instagram, which means I’m on Facebook (the company).
Brief aside: at what stage did we collectively aside that cynical snark should become a way of dealing with each other? You have no idea how when I talk about Instagram I often hear this: dude, you’re on Instagram because it’s owned by Facebook. I don’t think (or rather hope) that the cynical snark is done on purpose. I really think people don’t realize it any longer. It’s part of our collective strategy of living under neoliberal capitalism where there never is a way out. Thus, we end up making our lives even more miserable by telling each other we’re to blame for the very predicament we’re finding ourselves in.
Anyway, I’m on Instagram. My original reasoning is that it’s for discovery. I try to follow as many different photography people as possible, the idea being that I see a lot of very different stuff, including stuff I might miss if I relied on friends to suggest material. To a degree, that’s working. But the reality is that it’s not working very well. It used to work better in the past before changes in the companies algorithms increasingly started serving up stuff you have already seen. At this stage, you’re basically only being served what you’ve seen already. For example, very morning I see the same people listed first in my “Stories” feed. As much as I like some of those people, that’s not why I use the tool. There’s no more discovery.
I also don’t get to see the latest offerings by people I follow. The order is nonsensical. Something happens or is supposed to happen – if I’m lucky I might see it hours later. I also don’t know what percentage of the people I follow actually show up in my feed. My gut feeling is at best 30%. Many people just become invisible because the algorithm doesn’t show them to me any longer. On top of that, there’s the shadowbanning and censorship, which creates another huge set of problems. The other day, the algorithm started censoring content about Palestine heavily. Get this: “Instagram removed posts and blocked hashtags about one of Islam’s holiest mosques because its content moderation system mistakenly associated the site with a designation the company reserves for terrorist organizations”. Mistakenly? The company spends enormous amounts of money on software and engineers. How likely is it that it’s just some silly mistake? There’s no way it is – any more than that it’s a coincidence that, for example, facial-recognition software can’t deal as well with Black as with White faces. That’s systemic bias (the reasons for which are well known).
A little while ago, I set up an Instagram account for my photobook. On that account I decided to follow every person back, instead of “curating” the people I follow. But then I made the mistake of liking some images and looking at some Stories, and guess what happened? Now, every time I switch to that account, I see the same people… You just can’t escape the algorithm.
It’s not that Instagram has impoverished photography: it’s the algorithm that has done the job. And that algorithm is the product of ideology at Facebook HQ.
So every morning, I’m asking myself “Why am I looking at this? This is not what I set out to use this for.”
I don’t like to think in the terms of neoliberal capitalism. To ponder my “return on investment” (ROI) strikes me as buying into the system. Still, what’s my ROI on Instagram or Twitter? How much discovery is there, and how much time is spent looking at stuff I’m actually not that interested in? I mean, I originally started using Instagram because I thought not looking at how people used it would be a bad idea, given I write about photography. But if the tool makes discovering the breadth of photography so difficult, while serving up what it believes I am interested in (the same variant of the same stuff I’ve seen before) there’s a vastly reduced incentive for me to remain active.
Roughly six years ago, what is now the Search function was called something else. I remember there were a lot of strange pictures. Almost every picture came with these following words: “based on people you follow.” At some stage, I started collecting pictures that struck me every day, and I made a little book for myself, covering the first half of 2015 (sequenced based on the dates when I found them). At some stage, the company changed their algorithm, and now, my “Search” window is a collection of three different things: accounts teachinig Japanese in tiny morsels, pictures of cute animals, and pictures of cameras. I can’t remember the last time I actually discovered something interesting that way. Also, I don’t understand at all why the algorithm thinks I might be interested in cameras. Anyone who knows me well is aware of the fact that once photographers start talking about cameras, my eyes roll back into my head and I fall into a coma. It’s just all so strange.
Honestly, I have the feeling that it’s time for me to massively disengage from social media. I’ve never enjoyed them all that much in the first place, and they mostly don’t do for me what I would like them to do. When I want to engage with my friends I email them, or I talk to them on Zoom, or maybe I message them. It has become almost impossible to discover genuinely new stuff that’s interesting.
Having been online as long as I have, I know that there is plenty of interesting stuff. But the tools we used to have to discover such stuff have been taken from us. I guess the only thing left for me at this stage is to say: if you see something interesting and/or fun, please share it with me! Email me! Be in touch! At the end of the day, we can either wait for the corporate overlords of social media to fix the mess they’ve created (which obviously they don’t see as a mess, given it makes them money), or we can try to break out of the bubble ourselves.
I’m sorry if this email was maybe a lot of pessimistic than my previous ones. But this stuff has been grating on me for such a long time. Thank you for reading!
– Jörg