In the developed economies of the 21st century, it is nigh unthinkable to leave home without a smartphone, the metallic extension of the human body. They are one of the most pervasive and disruptive technologies of the past hundred years, and have already invaded our minds. Recent data from New Relic, a company that monitors application performance, shows that four times more Android phones and tablets are activated each day than are babies born. We check those devices every six and a half minutes.
These trends shift communication from personal and local to general and global. A million and a half applications have been built upon the foundation of the mobile network, revolutionizing countless industries and business processes. One of the most popular is Instagram,which combines social communication with aesthetic appeal to provide a forum for artistic production for over 150 million users.
For the foreseeable future, Instagram is here to stay. The application brings a grand range of potential benefits, but also a host of evils. At its worst, Instagram allows teenage girls, muscle-bound boys, and the average narcissist to amass large followings of strangers and stalkers, who in return for a simple “like,” can view over-sexualized images devoid of meaning or artistic value. These so-called “selfies” are mostly a lazy, artless way of reminding the world that the subject is alive. It’s a socially acceptable way to quantify social standing, leading to a superficial and bizarre new philosophic reality for many in our generation: I selfie, therefore I am.
Instagram contributes to and perpetuates Scroll Culture, which is the main way we receive social updates. Our parents sent letters, called, and were trapped in friends’ homes for projector presentations of vacations; we receive millisecond-sized updates. We go for breadth rather than depth, because our social networks are too vast to allow us to spend much time on any single update. Instagram deemphasizes verbal communication; users can caption but rarely do. Likes, denoted by rinky-dink hearts - the internet equivalent of a casual nod - far outnumber comments, which users have to spend several seconds to compose.
Facebook has illuminated the depressive effects from social comparison, and Instagram can be worse. Your friend’s photos of a beautiful vacation, a fun night out, or a new car can be vexing enough, but at least they are complemented in the Newsfeed by news articles, interesting links, and the occasional Onion satire. Instagram consists purely of carefully curated and perfected photos of how awesome a friend’s life is, showing scrollers what they’re missing in real time.
In addition to twisting social reality, Instagram also distorts time. A user may take dozens of photos, select one, scroll through dozens of possible filters, select one, only to then agonize over hashtags. This takes far more time than most followers will spend looking at the product. The main problem is that followers forget how long their own friends are spending curating photos by dressing themselves, applying makeup, retaking the photo several times, and trying on different tints. Users must be wary of these social comparison drawbacks. Instagram is not reality, but reality reframed.
Nevertheless, the application offers potentially huge benefits for global organization, cohesion, and syncretism, as well as for artistic production and self-expression. Despite its pitfalls, Instagram has already realized many of these benefits by making art and photography simple and accessible. It allows users to reframe reality with the tap of a finger on a screen, to add a filter changing the tint and color, to note where and when the photo was taken, and (most importantly, of course) to add a hashtag categorizing its content for viewers..
Hashtags are much derided for damaging spoken language. They are often overused, misplaced, and pathetic. Yet hashtags also have enormous potential for global organization and cohesion. They allow users to search for any subject under the sun and see personal variations in word connotations. Where one user thinks of #beautiful as a Prius rounding the cobblestone street of a European town, another sees #beautiful as a pagoda framed by a breaking dawn, and still another sees #beautiful in two pretty ladies on a swing set, one upside down, hair flowing sideways. A grad student in California sees #procrastination as a lit laptop, a flaming candle, and a frosty beer, while another sees it in a disheveled suitcase. There are around four and a half million photos hash-tagged #hawaii, ranging from the sandy shore to crashing waves to a gorgeous, green eyed tabby cat. One can #hashsurf for days and see a world produced by peers, friends yet to be met, and companies worth exploring.
This is key. There was a time when our concept of the world was produced by print, radio, and television broadcasting networks which often coalesced into sprawling media empires. Thanks to social media outlets like Instagram, our conceptualization of the 21st century world is increasingly created by regular people, paid not in dollars but in social standing and artistic gratification.
This means that time, space, and the profit motive are being destroyed in one fell cyber swoop, replaced by instantaneous information verifiable through massed opinions. Spartan wrestling matches could be remembered differently by each witness. Chamberlain’s legendary yet untelevised hundred point game is verified only in radio accounts, as was Welles’ infamous War of the Worlds radio hoax. But Messi’s goal will be broadcast by thousands before the ball even hits the back of the net.
The hashtag and insta-update affect more than sporting and Friday nights. Recent social revolutions have used the hashtag for coordination. From Occupy Wall Street to the Arab Spring and the Egyptian people’s ousting of Mubarak, massive political movements use the hashtag to great effect.
Although most of these revolutions used Twitter as their medium of choice, the Instagram hashtag has similar potential. Together, social media platforms are creating and innovating a global language, one based on English, common interests, and the universal human desire for improvement and happiness. Just as a Chilean envies the New York strolling through #centralpark, so too does the concrete-bound New Yorker envy the Chilean skiing the #andes in July. Such global communication has implications beyond the meaning of beauty and envy.
20th century thinkers predicted world peace based on globalized economics and interconnected trade. Marx, Engels, and Angell reasoned that nations would not war due to the vast amount of capital at stake; both the bourgeoisie and the legislators had estates upon estates to lose. Yet wars, from WWI to ethnic and religious struggles to civil wars over scarce resources, still came, and they still come today.
21st century peace will be based on shared language, culture, and communication. Instagram and other social media are creating that. With the tap of #travelgram, one flies from Dubai to Dublin, from Shanghai to South Africa. Scrolling through photos of home made food or college students at work (or, more likely, at play) shows us how the world is coming together. Instagram users are better termed producers, for they create value far beyond profit. They are creating a common, accessible, and beautiful world.
