performance (an intermission)
When people talk of the collateral damage of instagram and tiktok on their self-esteem, I cannot help but zone out from a lack of relatability. I hear echoes of Tyler the Creator laughing in the back of my head: "Hahahahahahahaha How The Fuck Is A Social Media Informed Insecurity Real Hahahaha Just Walk Away From The Screen Like Close Your Eyes Haha". To be so dismissive is cruel of me, nonetheless there is a truth here. I've never been one to follow celebrities and influencers—in fact, they're my favorite accounts to block—and this rejection of celebrity only became more true once the algorithm shifted to obfuscate my friends posts in the favor of popular accounts and advertisements. Regardless of how much I enjoy [Famous Actor] or [Publishing Imprint] and therefore theoretically wouldn't mind updates on their goings, I remain fundamentally opposed to the algorithm's prioritie$. All of this to say, instagram does not impact my self-esteem because 1) I have altered my behavior to see Algorithmically Beautiful People as little as possible and 2) I'm hypercritical and an anti-capitalist so photo dumps of vacation in Dubai do nothing for me anyway.
Instead, my problem with instagram is that I simply cannot shut the fuck up. I love to post. I love my echo chamber of devout story-likers. I love the dopamine rush. Yet with the rush comes the crash. I'm one year sober (yeah, brag), and I cannot help but compare the existential dread I sometimes get from posting to that of 'hangxiety'. I talk too much, I'm so annoying, I can't read the room. Why did I do that? Who even cares? Superficial worries that suggest I am of the mind that I possess a great importance to all who casually scroll through my stories. Regardless, the posting does not stop. It is a compulsion.
Instagram is my proof of existence. Yet it remains a performance of my imagined Self. Actual life is so much bigger than a curated 1080x1920 photo. The self-aware spiral is a curse. I do not need evidentiary support to know I exist—that the world I inhabit exists, the things I love dearly exist—yet I cannot stop the Add to Story loop. Susan Sontag had prescient thoughts on the matter of my obsession:
Needing to have reality confirmed and experience enhanced by photographs is an aesthetic consumerism to which everyone is now addicted... Poignant longings for beauty, for an end to probing below the surface, for a redemption and celebration of the body of the world—all these elements of erotic feeling are affirmed in the pleasure we take in photographs. But other, less liberating feelings are expressed as well. It would not be wrong to speak of people having a compulsion to photograph: to turn experience itself into a way of seeing. Ultimately, having an experience becomes identical with taking a photograph of it, and participating in a public event comes more and more to be equivalent to looking at it in photographed form.1
I am logging out of instagram for the unforeseeable future.2 I want to live a life without this compulsion to share, to perform, to joke. I want to sit with myself, comfortably. I want to take possession of my existence. In a global landscape where anything and everything is commodified, I desperately crave just one thing to have as my own. I want to keep myself to myself.
Turning to blogging is a diversion, but it is at least (relatively) insular. Unlike instagram, my audience is imagined—anonymous and disembodied from reality. I now perform for pixels.
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Susan Sontag, On Photography, (New York: Picador, 2001), 24.↩
Perhaps I will log out of Letterboxd as well since that is the only other social media site on which I post. It could be a fun experiment to pick films at random, based upon mood, instead of relying on my watchlist. Maybe I'll even fine-tune the ability to actually commit to something instead of spending an hour+ scrolling.↩