Welcome to the creativity crisis of the 21st century. We are facing the greatest epidemic of the imagination the world has yet to experience, infecting almost 20% of the American population by means of a cell phone app. It has swept across our nation over the past five years, targeting those in their most fragile stages of mental development. I know you caught it; I can tell by the way your eyelids droop, your fingers twitch and your face glows a haunting shade of white to the shine of a backlight. You crave the contagion because you thought it was the medication, but you really self-prescribed the germ. It infects boundlessly, lurking for prey behind the glass screen of the poisonous Apple. Bite the right colorful square and you’ll swallow the worm. Powerlessly wait as that worm sucks the creative stomach juices right out of you, leaving you dazed, malnourished and incomplete. There is no vaccine. Immunity is unheard of. The survivor awaits reinfection as school children learn that jungles are concrete, music is guitar hero, and art is Instagram.
“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because you instagramed it.”
Over the past five years Instagram has quickly grown to become one of the most popular forms of social media. With about 70 million photos posted everyday, I cannot help but ask the question: what makes this application so appealing, especially to those of our own generation?
“Mirror, Mirror on the wall, whose Instagram is the artiest of them all?”
Instagram is art, at least to the 2015 teenager. Our daily lives are packed so full of school work, sports and socializing that the average student cannot find time throughout their day to express themselves. Instagram offers a fast pass into the vast world of creativity and self-expression by making photography editing and sharing quick and easy. It is much faster, for example, to express yourself by taking a picture of the snowy green and sharing it on Instagram than to write about how it makes you feel, singing a tune it inspires, or studying its shape with the soft led of a pencil. Instagram is great in the sense that we are finding time for art in our daily lives, but in reality not all of us can be photographers. Every person has to find his or her own path to the imaginative world; we are forcing ourselves to be satisfied with photography.
“We miss 100% of the Instagrams we don’t take.”
Humans obsess over the concept of identity and self-discovery. We want to understand on a generic level who we are based on how others see us. Scientific studies prove that the brain releases dopamine when a person gets a like on his or her Instagram, which gives the person a tiny euphoric sensation. By extension, likes on Instagram are highs themselves. It has been hypothesized that the brain releases dopamine, making people feel good about themselves because others have indicated their approval for the individual by clicking the like button. If photos are art and art is self-expression, then what do they say about a person’s self-reflection? Occasionally scrolling through our own Instagram accounts demonstrates this quest for a personal identity. But are we finding what we are looking for? Do you actually learn who you are by reflecting your own gallery of edited photos? Of course not.
As we try to self-discover through our own Instagrams, we hinder the very possibility of doing so by transforming our own memories. We look back at our Instagram accounts and remember moments not as they happened, but as we portrayed them to be based on the way we altered them with filters and other editing techniques. When we capture average moments and edit them to make others think we are in the midst of a life defining moment, we fool ourselves into thinking that we are. We fabricate beauty in the form of photos to make others think we live a beautiful life in the hopes that our lives become the fictitious reality we pretend to live. The constant need to capture every moment in hopes of putting it on the Internet is inadvertently training our minds to think of every moment as an anticipated memory. So we grasp harder onto fleeting moments by taking even more pictures and we add vintage filters to feel more nostalgic about our past adventures. Since our past has been fabricated to prove something to others, we are left confused, unable to answer questions about our own identity.
“I think, therefore I Instagram.”
I recognize this is all incredibly extreme. This is meant to be a message of warning rather than an obituary. Not all Instagram users are incapable of harnessing creativity or unable to enjoy a moment for what it’s worth. As a user of Instagram, I do not feel it inhibits my originality, but I do genuinely believe it skews the way I view my past experiences and my overall sense of self.
As you check your notifications, check yourself. Remind yourself that every moment does not have to be relieved later. Forget putting on a show for others and just enjoy the show of life. Don’t allow Instagram to change the way you experience reality. And try something new. Write words. Play music. Paint pictures. Go do something, and if you really want to take a photo of it, do that too; just be mindful of your intentions behind sharing it. Hopefully Instagram can turn into a place where we share the beauty of our own creations rather than a falsified wonderland that none of us actually live in. And don’t get me started on Snap Chat… •
If Instagram is a distorted telling of how one perceives the world and themselves, I wonder if you could argue that Twitter is a warped summarization of one’s thoughts. Do these social media networks amplify one’s ability to be self-aware, or cheapen their experiences?
Good article. Though I don’t own an Instagram, I’d love to know how many people looked back through theirs and their friends’ after reading this to evaluate their own life and artistry.