
The Bleak Reality of the Instagram Experience - pseudolus
https://thewalrus.ca/the-bleak-reality-of-the-instagram-experience/
======
onion2k
In the early days of Instagram I had an idea for a bot that would tag photos
with the approximate value of the things in them. The scenes mentioned in the
article wouldn't really be 'taggable', but someone's fancy dinner or handbag
or car certainly would. The beauty of it would be to distill what Instagram is
about (living an enviable life) down to a very obvious message. If it worked
the next step would be to include a "league table" position, eg "Your post is
the 10,500,312th most expensive on Instagram."

I think I just enjoy ruining other people's fun a bit too much.

~~~
lbotos
Hilariously Ad posts on instagram now will let you click items in the image
and get their price. Half way there. :)

~~~
CharlesColeman
It's sort of like the photo captions in a fashion magazine, where they list
all the clothing items the models are wearing and their price.

~~~
asdff
I've seen good comparisons between instagram and sears catalogues.

------
settsu
What the article seems to sidestep (as does society-at-large, it seems) isn’t
so much the artifice of an experience or its documentation, but the
motivations of the people involved.

In other words, we seem to have arrived at a stage where vapidity is not only
tolerated or accepted but encouraged, lauded, and rewarded.

Thus an entire economy has been built atop of an “influencer” cargo cult (and
too few seem at all concerned about it.)

~~~
ijpoijpoihpiuoh
The celebration of beauty, fame, fashion, and influence isn't a new thing.
It's as old as human history.

(I wonder if nerds complaining about the vapidity of fashion has also been
around since the dawn of human civilization?)

~~~
52-6F-62
In some civilizations I'm afraid many of them would have been eunuchs. At
least there's one thing we can feel good about in the present.

------
Jaruzel
Maybe it's time to revert back to[1], or even create a new service that
removes the artificial layer of photo sharing...

A camera app on your phone, that can't access your files, and has no inbuilt
filters. You take the photo, and it instantly gets uploaded to the photo
sharing service. No editing, no offline photo manipulation. _What you shoot,
is what what you share._ Deleting a previously uploaded photo should be
possible, but a deliberately complex affair, to discourage image curating.

I doubt anyone would use this kind of app, but it's nice to imagine something
like it existing.

\---

[1] Instagram was originally 'as-shot + filters only' on your phone. Later,
they caved and allowed previously shot photos on your camera roll to be
uploaded, which led to an abundance of phone photo editing apps, then finally
they allowed desktop uploads, and that was the end of what made Instagram
different.

~~~
r_c_a_d
In the late 1990s I was part of a group that was thinking about how cameras
might be able to sign images so that later editing could be detected. The
motive then was connected to using images as evidence. But I guess you could
also use it to mark edited images in some way.

Would apps like Instagram be "improved" if retouched images displayed a
prominent "FAKE" icon of some sort?

~~~
pjc50
What does "fake" mean? Even if you're taking as-camera images (which have
already had de-Bayer and some level of dynamic range and denoise processing,
which may be considerable and involve machine learning!), then you can't tell
what manipulation has been applied to the scene. You can rent little "sets"
for taking photography in. Props and clothes can be borrowed. And so on.

Authenticity is a product, just like any other. And it's increasingly hard to
say what it even means in the 21st century.

~~~
Spooky23
I don't know the answer to this.

But I always use McDonald's (although any restaurant can be used here) as the
core of the conundrum of fake vs. real. Look at a corporate shot of a
cheeseburger and compare it to reality. The marketing cheeseburger is the
platonic ideal of the product -- it's fresh, perfectly prepared with care with
all of the ingredients visible. The cheeseburger on the ground looks like a
crumpled napkin in comparison.

Is the marketing cheeseburger fake?

When I look at some of the more image-conscious Facebook/Instagram people,
some of them are kinda insane with editing and retouching. My wife has an old
acquaintance who produces a highly "optimized" picture at least twice a month.
(With substantial retouch to her face and usually other body "enhancements".
In the age of Instagram+Photoshop, when does someone cross the line from
marketing cheeseburger to fraud?

~~~
maxxxxx
“Is the marketing cheeseburger fake?”

I would say yes, it’s fake and probably fraud. You should have to show real
products in advertising and not an idealized version.

~~~
joncrocks
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oSd0keSj2W8)

~~~
52-6F-62
So many late nights at that McDonalds, and in that area. (Dundas and Bathurst
- Toronto). Even this video is an idealization. That corner gets grimy at
night. At least it used to around that time. And that burger she bought was
_not_ what they look like coming out of there. I have to laugh a little...

At least they don't use waxes in the model burgers anymore. That's a step
toward honesty, at least.

------
StevePerkins
Is Instagram still heavily used by the Hacker News demographic? I'm starting
to get a bit older, so I'm not always current, but my impression from my
social circle is that it's fading like Facebook. I know a handful of "power
users" who post nonsense everyday, but most people I know (myself included)
never post at all now.

For me now, Instagram is a website, where I briefly check out surgically-
altered fitness models doing barbell squats while I'm standing in line at the
grocery store. I use the PWA, because the native app constantly freezes on two
separate devices and the developers don't seem to care.

I'm stupefied by the idea that this could still be an important part of life
for many average adults.

~~~
philg_jr
Try being a single dude in your 20s/early 30s without some "social proof" when
trying to talk to 30 and younger girls. They will immediately think you are a
weirdo for not having that proof that you're not some sort of loner. I
personally use ig for posting things that give me a little more edge over
normal dudes - my Olympic weightlifting progress, my trips
snowboarding/surfing, my cute dogs, music festivals/shows that I got to...it's
helpful. but I'm not gonna post on there about the new Jenkinsfile that I
spent a week crafting to deploy a 10 microservices for a state machine. RIP
Google+, the Instagram for geeks.

~~~
saberience
Are you joking? I'm 35 and regularly date girls (in SoCal) with an age range
of 22 through 28 or so. I have an instagram account which I never use and has
about 8 photos on it from years ago. No one ever asks me to show my instagram
account and I never mention it. I have tons of "dating success."

So your theory of "social proof" through Instagram doesn't seem valid at all
for me. Note: I don't have an active FB account either. So basically, I manage
to successfully date many 20-something women with basically zero social media.

------
imh
I went to the color factory and thought it was fun without taking pictures. I
also went to a gorgeous shrine on a lake near Mt Fuji and there was a line
dozens of people long to take a selfie at it. The problem isn't the pop-up
experiences.

------
gammateam
This article misses that people WANT other museums to be like this.

The modern art museum experience is a quiet keep to your self affair, and
people arent even sure they can take photos. Compare that to the same artist’s
gallery opening in a cool but grundgy part of town, and it is a loud, social
and wine laden affair.

Popup museums fit right in between. Meant to be shared solely by your
attendance and photo tagging with no ambiguity on the rules.

Maybe everything else the article wrote has some merit, but it is definitely
out of touch and takes satisfaction from that reality, which is just poor
journalism.

------
kd5bjo
These have existed for decades as wax museums, the only difference is the
style of photo that’s popular.

~~~
arcticfox
IMO as a non-Instagram/non-Facebook user, wax museums are much more
independently interesting than the stuff featured in the article (brightly
colored baths, ball pits, walls).

I had a good enough time just looking at the wax models, even if the obvious
attraction there for most people was taking photos.

------
theExperience
Honestly, I love that people want more artsy experiences in their life.
Growing up in the 80s, everything was about conforming and being the same. If
you were a guy, you had to like sports and listen to Bruce Springsteen. If you
liked art you were a "fag"; if you liked science you were a "nerd"; and if you
were either of those you didn't have a place in society. My wife tells me it
was similar for the girls, though they had some leeway on the art.

I get that Instagram in particular brings out the worst qualities of wanting
to look cool or important or whatever. And I agree that's awful. But man I
would have killed for some sort of immersive artistic space to explore when I
was a kid.

I'll take this over hanging out at the mall buying things for no real purpose
any day.

~~~
52-6F-62
Instagram _is_ the mall, now...

------
scott_s
A similar piece from the NYT last year: "The Existential Void of the Pop-Up
‘Experience’", [https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/arts/color-factory-
museum...](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/arts/color-factory-museum-of-
ice-cream-rose-mansion-29rooms-candytopia.html)

------
joe_the_user
_" The first phase of the domination of the economy over social life brought
into the definition of all human realization the obvious degradation of being
into having. The present phase of total occupation of social life by the
accumulated results of the economy leads to a generalized sliding of having
into appearing, from which all actual “having” must draw its immediate
prestige and its ultimate function."_

Guy Debord Thesis 17, Society Of The Spectacle

[1]
[https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.ht...](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/debord/society.htm)

~~~
l33tbro
I love Debord and it's a really neat quote to relate to the article, but do
you think this holds up to the cold light of evolutionary biology? Ie, hasn't
'appearing' long been an intrinsic part of sexual selection and raising status
across multiple species?

~~~
claudiawerner
The question of how any biological impulse operates within the economy Debord
describes is an obscure and not a straightforward one. I'd say our human (i.e
paychological) impulses come to the front. That is to say, the mind as
developed in modern capitalist society obscures the biological link if any to
signalling attractiveness.

------
ablation
Instagram advertising was what finally drove me off the platform. An
unstoppable tidal wave of poorly-targeted products including cheap sunglasses,
bizarre "on-trend" t-shirts and other assorted crap by brands that sounded
like they'd chosen their name from a random name generator. And the ads were
just about every third image. Grim.

~~~
josteink
> An unstoppable tidal wave of poorly-targeted products

Good targeting = tracking.

I’m happy with poor targeting, thank you very much.

~~~
ablation
Sure, I understand what you're saying. It wasn't necessarily the poor
targeting, simply the volume of ads that were pumped in and all such terrible
quality.

------
ddeokbokki
This article really bugs me, the issue is coming from our use of social media
rather than installations themselves.

If it wasn't designed just to cash-in on this issue, these could be actual art
installations of the likes of Kusama's rather than extravagant photo booths.

------
oftenwrong
Why is it desirable to have the same photo as so many other users? Wouldn't it
get more 'likes' if it was a more original photo?

~~~
dorian-graph
Being original is a lot harder. People know they won't get as many likes as
the original as well, but they'd get a sufficient from their friends—most
people aren't aiming for worldwide popularity. It's a sort of consumerism and
a cheap way to feel good. I'd wager that most people really don't _care_, they
just want to be _in_.

Another example is the 'hygge' trend where people buy a candle, made in some
Scandinavian country, and add some wood ornament in their home. It's not
'real', but it's enough for amongst their peers.

------
settsu
:sad:

