On Instagram
An Announcement and a Meditation
Hello, Dames Nationals!
As our paying subscribers have already heard, Two Bossy Dames is now an Instagram account as well as a newsletter! So far, we’ve only made a few grid posts and the vast majority of them have been about Beyoncé’s new music:
But I know we’re all eager to learn what we can accomplish on this platform. I, for one, am taking it as an opportunity to become one of my favorite types of Instagrammers: the ones that venture out into the wilds of TikTok and, Prometheus-like, bring back fire #content for me and other geriatric millennials too overwhelmed to find it for ourselves. Despite my fear that getting into TikTok will be a bit like inviting my dopamine-addicted ADHD brain to Scrooge McDuck-dive into a pool full of cocaine, I feel ready to venture out and see what it has to offer— but only for you, Dames Nation.
Well, and because I have to understand the platform well enough to make sure my brilliant Dakota Johnson memes go viral.
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Most often, though, what I feel when navigating either Instagram or TikTok is nostalgia for the platform at which I truly excelled: Twitter. I can really enjoy letting other peoples’ beautiful or silly visuals wash over me, and I even enjoy making my own from time to time. Memes— they’re a hoot, it turns out! But what I miss about Twitter is the conversation.
On Instagram, if I make something other people like, I may get to see what they think of it in a private message, but none of the people talking to me get to see what the others are saying. If I make something people care to share with their friends, I’ll see it in the metrics on my post, but I can’t see how they presented it to their friends, or what their friends thought of it. Given the state of discourse at Twitter the last few years, I know it seems absolutely batty to miss hearing what strangers say to one another about me, but look: I led a pretty charmed existence on Twitter. People mostly shared my tweets because they liked what I had to say, and I mostly liked the people who liked what I said. In the best days, every good tweet could generate its own little cocktail party, and a good response could forge so many friendships.
I’ve been lucky enough to discover a handful of great people through Instagram and, because conversations are by default more private, those interactions can have a depth and sweetness the public sparkle of a Twitter reply could not always provide. But I miss the scrum. It’s a little bit like— and this is a weird analogy, but stay with me— the way public transportation in major cities is always designed to take people from surrounding neighborhoods into the city center: Instagram is great at pointing us all in the same direction. But, when you live in a city, I find I always want to go from neighborhood to neighborhood— the center holds all these smaller ecosystems together, but it’s rarely as interesting as its sideshows. On Twitter, I could connect laterally so easily, and be discovered laterally. On Instagram, I have to go IN to the center and then BACK OUT to the other sideshows— it simply isn’t as fun.
There is real pleasure to be found on these new platforms. There are niche compliments you didn’t know you needed, Pug of the Rings humor, wildly charming dance-off videos, important compilations of David Tennant walking, entire accounts dedicated to Brutalist or Art Nouveau architecture, and so many other marvels. But: I am what I am, and my heart will always belong to Twitter (may her memory be a blessing).
WITH THAT SAID: We’re dying to know whose work you love on both Instagram and TikTok, so do drop some recommendations in the comments. We aim to do some curating and we want a killer collection of people from whomst to pull!
Until next week, mes amis!
XOXO/ Dame Margaret