Instagram Famous
“Fame (fame)puts you there where things are hollow/ Fame (fame)” “Fame” David Bowie
My current workplace is somewhere where people want to be seen—in fact, most places I’ve worked have been like that.
But the introduction of the smartphone in 2007 changed the dynamics of “being seen”completely.
Prior to that, there would be the rare person with a serious camera photographing dish by dish at the then small number of tasting menu restaurants in Chicago, and at one restaurant, we would give away disposable cameras, but there were not people with LED bricks attached to their phones, anxiously composing still lives with their food and drinks, as if to affirm how interesting their lives could look if posed properly.
S. likes to read me “Dear Abby” over coffee, and one recent unfortunate query has stuck with me: a mother of a “bridezilla”wrote in, whose daughter had demanded she buy her a wedding dress neither of them could afford, and who had then also asked her to pay for hair extensions for herself for the wedding pictures.
Now, the curation of the visual aspects of weddings in general have always been a thing, as far back as the daguerreotype, but what struck me about this aggressive push to “package” her mother for the camera, even against her mother’s will, was the extent to which the importance of the image of the event eclipsed the event itself.
2.
When Instagram first came to my notice, I didn’t wonder how all these good-looking people came to be in such scenic settings—the artifice was so self-evident, and at the time, frankly seemed the point. This was before cartoon effects on Snapchat, which is where the buck stopped for me, but the pleasure of image manipulation seemed to be the point of the app. I like to saturate the color in my own photography and accentuate the black space, and the filters were fun for that kind of low stakes manipulation.
Of course, as my entree to this world was the artistic gay corner of Instagram, there was a sense of irony baked in. Queer presentation is in itself self-conscious in a stylish way and camp-inflected by its very nature.
But human vanity, as well as the inherent marketing possibilities of branding oneself for an audience, soon created fertile ground for “influencer” culture to emerge.
I am part of the first generation of College students who used the internet regularly, and whatever then discussed utopian possibilities existed for what was then the “World Wide Web” to operate like the Library of Alexandria, make space for Dadaist exploration or facilitate a worldwide higher consciousness, were eclipsed by the possibility of radically self-editing our always ultimately mundane lives, not to disrupt hegemonies of gaze, but to momentarily proclaim that we are, in some discretely recordable way, “winning at life.”
(Look at this here flatbread!)
3.
The first lines of the song “Shame” by the Eurythmics capture well the artificial dynamic of what aspirational social media content tries to portray:
“Now there's a lifestyle/
With painted lips/
Now there's a lifestyle/
Everybody wants it/
But it don't exist.”
Even honest attempts to capture an interior world through exterior presentation still seem to become obfuscated by social media.
Vacation pictures are nothing new, and official occasions have been photographed as long as there has been photography, but the deployment of photography on social media now seems quite the opposite of courtroom sketching, which aims to rather mercilessly and quickly convey the movements of subjects. The mimetic process of capturing “the moment” and pinning it up on social media actually seems the opposite, fully animated by the desire to present lived life through an artificial and aspirational aperture: life captured at its shiniest, the subjects performing tableaus of satisfaction that manage to be both well lit and shot through cheesecloth, and additionally enhanced with the post-Snapchat ability not just to enhance an image through light and shading, but to insert backgrounds (that was Zoom travel during lockdown), edit the bodies a photo purports to display,(sometimes to a ridiculous degree) or even change or add faces.
All of this was possible with higher level editing suites previously, but not at the press of a button on a handheld computer.
Without even getting into the “worldwide cafeteria” aspect of social media for teenagers—I look forward to reading “The Anxious Generation” on this subject, the degree to which we can quite literally self-edit snapshots of ourselves to offer a digitally glorified view into our activities, without a whisper of whatever doubt, uncertainty, insecurity, anxiety or straight up dysfunction might undergird such a pleasing picture, seems to have become artificial beyond decorative artifice, to become a kind of purposefully non-inclusive saccharine propaganda.
The only thing more anxiety provoking than the reasonable presumption that everyone is filtering, editing and manipulating their photos is the anxiety provoked by wondering if they’re in fact not manipulating these images.
What if they really are that fit and attractive and seemingly super-fulfilled in that pictured moment?And living like people in ads? They can’t be! Our lizard brain still ponders, “but what if they are?!?”
There they are, presented without hinting at the IBS, trauma or vacation-induced sticker shock anyone could be experiencing behind such curation. They are pictured in a beautiful setting, looking very pleased with their current lot in life, if perhaps a bit fashionably pouty, while you the spectator are not an image, but a person embedded in the lovely and horrible and triumphant and messy skein of real life, and you are definitely not in Ibiza.
4.
Making people want to want things they wouldn’t want on their own and marketing the unobtainable has always been the job of Madison Ave, but the most well constructed systems of oppression always get us to enlist ourselves as our own oppressors.
There is a big difference between an image of a good hair day, an accidentally flattering graduation picture or even a very posed and editorial photo shoot, and the endless stream of these desperation-adjacent, highly composed “still lives of satisfaction.”
And it is honestly challenging to be “real” in such an arena. Like asking someone “to act like themselves.”
The difficult, introspective and messy work of telling some truth, even just about one’s own self and existence, is not particularly facilitated by the click and attention economy.
5.
There was a certain ceiling to FOMO before the internet. One cousin going on a trip you couldn’t afford could be assimilated. Good for them! Maybe some of your friends seemed smarter, probably looked better in swimwear, or had what seemed like more interesting lives than you. It was a finite set of people.
A lot of adult life is knocking up against our own limits, making unforced errors and watching things go sideways in spite of our best efforts. There is less “defying gravity” off the stage of “Wicked.”
And if a mode of communication becomes saturated with highly manipulated content, and the surfeit of well lit cocktails, zany animals, beach scenes and other enviable moments, cease to be snapshots of a fuller existence, but their own raison d’être, dispatches from an imaginary existence free of blemishes, creditors, difficult in-laws, or when the pug in a funny hat goes to the bathroom on the carpet, there is, to an extent, a lie being told, or at least a very strategic series of omissions.
And given how credulous the target market for such content is, this “no blemishes” approach to self “creation” cannot help but invoke feelings of inadequacy.
You can actually watch the pitch deck for “Fyre Fest” online, and never has a shiny projection been more eclipsed by tawdry reality.
But the truth is, even when reality is vexing, most of the time, reality is still more inherently interesting than its curated substitute. Facades can be shinier, but are often as flimsy as the back view of a small town in a Western, nothing more than a thin veneer propped up with plywood.
There is a built in duality to consciousness in any given moment, the Instagram ready, “LOOK AT ME HERE,” presupposes a simultaneous more anxiety-laced and inescapable realization: “Look at me…here.”
Any discrete experience is not a one dimensional experience, and so maybe there’s a pink cocktail in your hand, and an LED brick in the other, but two other invisible hands gather strands of trauma, and another can barely hold onto its baggage, and you wonder why you said that thing in 1996, and they’ve probably forgotten, but you haven’t.
Lived reality, as we attempt to apprehend it, has dimensions. That dimensionality is quite literally what makes image-making and the written word interesting.
Scrubbing context, the pull of the past, the unknowability of the future and the instability of self can produce a glossy image, but not an honest one, and speaking honestly is our only gateway to actual connection, which at one now far off point seemed like the purpose of going “online” in the first place.