The Death of Social Media
On the gradual fall of Instagram
My first post will forever be ingrained in a deep dark corner of my memory. Three hands, each holding a vanilla bean frappuccino, dirty converse peaking through the edge of the photo, the Valencia filter and over-saturation making the green Starbucks logo all the more apparent. The caption was most likely littered with hashtags #like4like. The post is a distant memory, the thought of which often elicits a sharp sense of embarrassment. But that’s what it was all about. Instagram, at the time I downloaded it in elementary school, was defined through embarrassing oversharing because of a need to be noticed and liked. But now, it’s changed almost entirely, in fact the app seems to have taken a complete 180.
Instagram, as a platform, has had a gradual fall from grace. But why? Why is it that we are slowly all becoming quiet observers no longer sharing ourselves on the app? At one time our feeds were littered with selfies, vacations, coffees, sunsets but now we are watchers, subservient, we no longer like and comment we simply view through silent judgment. Our appetites have changed, but Instagram has not, they’ve tried that’s for sure, but our attention and our needs have shifted beyond what the app seems to be able to offer.
Instagram came at the perfect time in my teen development when being popular, and measuring popularity in numbers was the most important thing. Around the mid 2000s, Instagram was the brand new girl on the block. She came at a moment, when social media users needed a new great escape. Since then, Instagram has been on a steady increase, even now well beyond its hay-day, Instagram users are still on the rise, and yet the app is more boring than ever.
Now, posting a photo feels like a taboo. In fact, data has shown that users are actually posting less on Instagram and other social platforms. It’s become less social and more media. The advent of comments and likes and an exorbitant amount of back-to-back attention seeking posts is over (or if not over, slowly declining). However, despite the decline of users actually posting it was found that users are spending an increasing amount of time on the app. So if not posting what are users doing? What are the countless hours spent on the app being used for?
We’re watching.
It’s like Instagram has become a panopticon of sorts. A prison of looks and likes, entirely controlled by what is deemed popular and cool and trendy and good. We are both the watched and the watchers. Both the observers and the judged. Forever on display. But we aren’t engaging. We are stuck inside of our entrapments.
I can remember when it was cool to post a lone picture of your shoe or a tree. But we have evolved from the casualness of Instagram’s launch and in turn we ended up creating it into a showing off contest. The photos were fake, our captions were fake and our grids were curated to fulfill the needs and the wants of our viewers. We were at one point giving in to being watched, we wanted to be seen, to be liked, to be viewed through our photos.
But now, the idea of being viewed, evaluated and seen online has shifted. We are no longer curating our identity through posed photos. There is no longer the allure that there once was on the app. In place of our dependence on Instagram has come Tik Tok, and in the coolness fight between the two Instagram is sorely losing, but it’s not the app's fault. We are the one’s turning away, our attention spans have changed and so have our needs to fulfill it.
And after all, it’s not as if Instagram will actually die. However, our ability to use the app and to create organic meaningful interactions on it will. Slowly and surely, our use of the app will gradually deplete over time. That one friend who is dedicated to posting on their story every other day will stop and then we will have watched and viewed all that Instagram and our followers have to offer. But the one constant variable we can be certain of is that there will be something new out there to re-fulfill our attention and our ever evolving need to be seen, because that need will never die.