The hyper-specific nostalgia of Instagram places
The pros and cons of Insta's location specificity, plant of the week, and more
The current COVID surge is happening on a scale almost too terrible to conceive. We find sources of consolation in different ways, but if it might help to reconnect with the basic facts and mystery of existence, here’s a video featuring poems from the Irish writer David Whyte, some of his familiar landscapes, and one of the earliest known recordings of music in Ireland, a “keyhole view into the past” from 1905 etched on a wax cylinder. It’ll take four minutes of your day. (Here’s the rest of the 1905 music recordings.) Stay safe, wear a mask, avoid in-person gatherings in favor of video chats, phone calls, emails, letters…
The hyper-specific nostalgia of Instagram places
It used to be that when you’d Google a hiking trail or park to scope it out, you’d get to see a few basic images of perhaps the entrance sign, the visitor center, a vista or two. Smaller places might not have any photos. Then years passed and blogs accumulated. It’s now hard to find a park of any size that turns up no Google image results. But still, most of those tend to be pictures of the place without people: here are the views you can expect, some of the flora and fauna.
My late arrival to Instagram a couple years ago brought a new way of looking up a place before you go there. After I saw a friend post photos from a trail in New Hampshire, I clicked on the location tag. Dozens and dozens of posts turned up, an almost exhaustive accounting of the experiences you might have on this trail: hiking, biking, wading in a stony river, swimming in the summer, climbing around the granite boulders of the waterfall at the trail’s end, posing with mountains in the background. Every iteration of every possible selfie.
When you pull up a place on Instagram, you’re not just getting documentary evidence of its landscape features but instead all the experiences people see fit to post on the ’gram. This is partly stating the obvious. I just think that accessing this kind of content is now made easier than ever on Instagram in a way that other social media networks have not focused on and that Google searches don’t really replicate (nor should they, I think!)
I don’t feel that having this kind of information before visiting a place kills the mystery or anything like that. If a place is heavily visited, it’s hard to do something there that no one really has done before, and that’s fine. The more data I have before a challenging hike or a trip a couple hours away, the better. I do know that copy-catting on Instagram has led to the cairn-building craze, to which I will join others in asking folks to please stop doing unless you have a good reason. Otherwise, I see Instagram places as pretty value-neutral, morally speaking.
In COVID times, though, it’s the retrospective view of Instagram places that is hitting the hardest. If looking up a place before you go there on Instagram helps you figure out what you could feasibly do there, looking up a place you’ve visited in the past makes you aware of everything you’re not able to experience right now but that others are.
Take Forest Park Nature Center in Peoria, for example—not a particularly famous place but one we’d visit on any trip to see my wife’s family in Illinois. The location tag for the park on Instagram brings up just about every place you could take a selfie in the park, as well as just about every aspect, every season, every trail you could hope to see there. Compare that to the density of posts about any well-visited state park and you’ll probably see what I’m getting at: if you miss a place even a little bit, Instagram locations can act as an intensifier for that nostalgia.
There’s probably a version of this reflection that ends with saying something about vicariously experiencing these places through social media and thereby not missing them as much. But the way that Instagram places encourages you to substitute yourself into these multitudinous posts, imagine yourself as the one doing these things, has a different effect than hearing one single story from someone I know well about visiting a place and what the visit meant to them. That story, clearly belonging to a known other person, might actually calm me down and remind me that these places will still be there after social isolation. A hundred or a thousand micro-stories from strangers just drowns me in possible alternatives to our present moment, the way things could have been, and that’s not something to linger on.
Over the last dozen or so years, the social media landscape has continued to shuffle and reshuffle as companies have consolidated and tried to monetize our user activity in new ways. As a user, I just try to use these platforms in a limited way to connect with people and avoid the parts that make me miserable. There’s probably a way to use social media to collectively celebrate a place, even as strangers, and the different things the landscape means to each of us. Maybe that’s exactly what Instagram places are and I’m just pessimistic. For now I just know to ignore them and focus on what my friends and family post.
Plant of the week: Flat-branched tree clubmoss
It’s scarf weather, and it’s time for “flower of the week” to continue as “plant of the week” for a while. And it’s not even the end of the reproductive season for some plants. Clubmoss, a fern relative, sends out spores in yellowish cone-like structures called strobili, visible on the top of this tiny plant (the “club” of the clubmoss.)
I don’t remember seeing clubmosses in the Midwest, and when I first saw them out here, I first thought they were just evergreen saplings of some kind. Some of the other common names for flat-branched tree clubmoss, “princess pine” and “ground pine,” reflect that appearance. Clubmosses are relatives of ferns rather than mosses. Their lineage split off from other plants over 400 million years ago, at the time that the first plant vascular systems for transporting water to their tissues evolved. That allows clubmosses to survive in drier spots than mosses. They grow slowly, usually in acidic soils in open woodlands.
This species (Dendrolycopodium obscurum) is found from Georgia to northeast Canada and west to Wisconsin. I didn’t notice it earlier in the year because of all the fireworks from the flowering plants. Late fall reveals details obscured by summer’s abundance. Modern clubmosses have a unique tie to the deep past: forests of tree-like clubmosses over 100 feet tall characterized the Carboniferous period of over 300 million years ago. As these plants fell, they fossilized into the major coal seams of today. Modern clubmosses might look dainty, but they’re also shrewd survivors of mass extinctions who found a way to live and thrive on a drastically changed planet.
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Possum Notes is a weekly newsletter about wildlife and landscapes around where I live. It’s produced on occupied Massachusett and Wampanoag land.