’m thinking of starting a group therapy program for those who are addicted to Instagram Reels.
Before I watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma in 2020, I would absolutely treasure my personal algorithm. I believed her to be a friend, a trusted confidant, someone who knew me in ways I didn’t know myself. This was also before other apps like Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube adopted the TikTok mechanisms of short form videos available at a mere swipe — An update that was inevitable and absolutely devastating to the average social media user’s state of mind.
Each platform’s lexicon of video content contains a multitude of subtle differences between each other. I don’t trust a motherfucker who consistently uses Facebook under the age of 35. That’s another level of propaganda that I cannot fathom nor speak on. But I know my 68 year old grandmother’s feed is jam-packed with trad-wife and baby content because she won’t stop spamming my Facebook Messenger with them. YouTube is a bit more unhinged, a bit less contextual: Usually a bunch of wealthy influencers turning their bedrooms into ball-pits and animated equivalencies to those “relatable” Buzzfeed comics that used to be all over everyone’s explore page in 2015.
TikTok obviously reigns. The sheer amount of content allows for more niche videos to reach audiences of hundreds-of-thousands. But the standard for the average TikTok creator now is to post their videos both on TikTok and Instagram. This makes my Reel algorithm a confusing mix of content I actually like¹, oceans of white women discovering that they actually have curly hair², clips to movies and television shows that require me to dig through the comments to find the title of ³, and most recently, advertisements for those pocket laser hair-removal devices⁴. And then there’s shit like this:
How do I give this up? I think I’m finally aware of my own Fear of Missing Out that the internet has been allocating since its creation. What kind of person would I be if I wasn’t constantly consuming content? Happier, definitely, but what is happiness worth in a culture that values mindless content over art.
I'm often reminding myself of Aza Raskin. Dominico Contreras reports in The Tragic Story of the Infinite Scroll Feature, “Users can scroll infinitely without ever clicking, thanks to Infinite Scroll. ‘If you don't give your brain time to catch up with your impulses, you just keep scrolling.’ Raskin said in a BBC interview. He claimed that the innovation caused people to look at their phones for far longer than was necessary. ‘It's as if they're taking behavioral cocaine and just sprinkling it all over your interface and that's the thing that keeps you like coming back and back and back.’ he added as well.” Raskin has created a domino effect that has contributed to the mental well-being of everyone who is addicted to the internet. Where would we be as a society without the infinite scroll? Would we be more aware of the impulsive choices we make in our daily lives? More conscious of the way we consume media? Or would we just keep refreshing our feeds regardless?
I like to think I’m an optimist, but it’s hard to imagine a future where the people behind the interfaces we see every day finally decide to consider the implications of their actions. I wonder if they know how many self-esteems rest in the palm of their hands. I wonder if they even have the capacity to care about it.