The Evolving Exhibition of Us: A Decade of Sharing Pictures Online

I fell in love with photo sharing in 2006. I was 26, and had just started at ITP. Flickr opened a window into the private lives of others unlike any I had experienced before. The apartments, hobbies, lovers, and habits of my 200 classmates/new best friends were on display, and I consumed them all with relentless curiosity.

“Okay, so I am a millennial, but I am an elder! Elder millennial! Wizened. Sage. Yes, gather ’round the Snapchat, children. I’ll tell you the tale… of the landline.” 

-Iliza Shlesinger

In the early 2000s, photo sharing meant carrying around a point-and-shoot camera, maybe even a DSLR. You’d  take dozens of pictures, plug in your camera with a USB cord, and import them into iPhoto. From there, a quick edit, and finally you could upload to Flickr. Cameras on mobile phones were not ubiquitous; the ones that did exist took grainy, low-res photos. If your phone had a camera, an “instant” post was transmitted via an MMS message sent to a unique email address.

Once you posted photos you would wait a few hours, maybe even a day, to see who looked and who made comments. And it was the same procedure  we have today: shoot, edit, post, and see the reactions. But everything was so much slower then, and on a much smaller scale. Flickr had ~2.5 million users when it was acquired by Yahoo! in 2005. No one in your friend circle had thousands of followers, nor did you care what your follower count was. A couple comments on a few photos in your batch upload was enough to be satisfying. 

To consume Flickr was to often sink into a single topic for 20 minutes or more, looking at photo after photo, piecing all the people and events together. If the experience of online photos today is like a visual Twitter, this was more like reading a book. You’d shoot, say, an average night out like wedding photographers—capturing everyone and everything. And you posted in part, so that other people could see themselves in your feed.

It was thrilling then, to make a “public appearance” online. The act of posting felt risky, and to participate online this way didn’t only give us an understanding of other people, it also gave us a new way to understand ourselves.

Smoke signals, love letters, and emergency flares

Over time, sharing photos online remained a consistent ritual for me. I told myself I was documenting my life, but the real reasons I posted were far more nuanced.

On a warm spring evening in 2011, a year after Instagram launched, I sat in a West Village bar with my boyfriend, thinking about how our relationship would soon come to a painful end. I took out my phone, smiled and leaned into him, and posted a happy couple photo for everyone to like. 

“And to the degree that the individual maintains a show before others that he himself does not believe, he can come to experience a special kind of alienation from self and a special kind of wariness of others.”

-Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life)

If you look, you can see a whole spectrum of human ceremony and emotion played out in the art of people’s posts. There are mating rituals, acts of revenge, violence, and cries for help. There are public posts with thousands of viewers that exist to seek the attention of one person. And there are genuine acts of love, celebration, humor, and kindness. Each post is the start of a loop. To post is to initiate a call-in-wait for a response.

Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world…

I don’t remember the transition from Flickr to Instagram. It just happened, sort of like the time we all moved from renting movies at Blockbuster to Netflix. The venue changed, but, at first, the entertainment felt the same.

Suddenly in 2010, everyone had a camera with them all the time because you could have both a camera and a cell phone called “the iPhone”. So now, everything was photographed. Every moment from the magical to the mundane was an opportunity to share something. The tiny photo sharing space on the internet, once populated only by tech nerds and photography enthusiasts, now included Aunt Michelle, Cousin Becky, and all the high school friends you thought you left behind on MySpace. Then came the brands.

“Instagram is now basically a mall where I occasionally run into friends.” 

@buzz

After ITP, I began a career as a product designer. Eventually, as I dove into social software, my job went beyond designing interfaces to designing “engagement” systems. A startup CEO I worked for shared an article from design ethicist Tristan Harris with our team. He did this for the opposite reason that Harris wrote it. Our CEO wanted us to further employ, on our teenage user base, the exploitative, addictive design patterns Harris, himself, deplored.

Photo sharing was starting to feel gamified. The consumption of so many images meant that people were becoming better photographers by sheer osmosis. The word “influencer” emerged. Participation became less about sharing, and more about posting the right kind of photo to amass the most likes, the most comments, and, most importantly, the most followers. 

“When you are the camera and the camera is you.”

Minolta Advertisement (1976)

In March, 2017, I went to the soft opening of a hotel in upstate New York. The site was formerly an equestrian paradise, dotted with 18th-century farmhouses and stables now converted to five-star hotel suites. The second morning of our stay, my friend emerged in a blue plaid shirt, suspenders, and a pair of solid work boots. He asked me to take a photo of him outside sitting on a tractor in all his handsome-hipster-farmer goodness. After I took the picture, my friend posted the photo on Instagram, and changed out of costume. 

My weekend was amazing, thanks

As Instagram evolved, the Instagram aesthetic did too. What began as a few fun filters to add to your photos, morphed into a ritual, at times competitive, projection of a magazine-like portrayal of life. Companies were built around it. One such company, SelfMade, is a service that provides a team of experts to select and doctor photos to help people with their personal brands. If you look at the before and after feeds of their clients, the “before” feeds lack uniformity, a clear message or viewpoint. What SelfMade actually does is help transform people into brands. There are a lot of businesses built around managing influencers and social media marketing. What makes this business unique is that their initial target market was neither. It was ordinary people, interested in projecting a more extraordinary life.

Some of us have been possessed by a more fearful version
of who we are and aim the camera at ourselves to make sure we are living.
I can’t even say the word for what the picture is
called but it begins with self

-Michael Klein ( from his poem Harmonium)

Themed public photo studios self-referred to as “experiences” have popped up across major metropolitan cities. For a small fee, you can be photographed in an eye-popping bath of rosé or ice cream sprinkles. I’m sure we have all suffered that friend for whom the world itself has become one big Instagram pop-up experience. Nowhere is this better captured than in Ingrid Goes West, a black comedy starring Aubrey Plaza, who becomes obsessed with the seemingly perfect life of an Instagram influencer, Taylor Sloane. After befriending her, Taylor art directs a picture of them together and getting a mechanic to lay on the ground, capturing them at the perfect angle. 

Social photo sharing began as a way to show each other how we see the world. Over time it became a way to show the world how we want it to see us. Similar to your clothing, apartment, or food choices, your feed has become a signal of taste, something to be cultivated and curated. But poorly executed, your feed can have real world consequences, like the loss of friendships.  

“At first I shrugged off the inane selfies and oddly pedantic captions informing a seemingly imagined audience how to make “yummy” chia-seed pudding, or how yoga had taught her to appreciate her curves.”…”I started making excuses not to see her. I realized the relationship was over for me when she invited me to her birthday and I found I couldn’t for the life of me make myself go. She might have been hurt, but I didn’t care; she had become insufferable to me.”

-Hayley Phelan “When You Love Your Friend But Hate Her Social-Media Presence” 

Shout out to all my followers

When Instagram first came out, the people I followed and the people who followed me were the same. Over time, as the app grew in popularity, that kind of following changed. Followers and following counts dramatically increased for everyone. The explosion of people, marked a shift from having a community to having an audience. This ultimately changed the mental model of what gets posted. People act differently in their living room than they do on stage. They may feel more vulnerable and guarded. You’re sharing with a community, but working for an audience.

For me, Instagram eventually became a better place for watching strangers than friends. It’s great for checking out current fashion or exploring a potential vacation spot. I like following artists, illustrators, comedians, and low-brow memes. They rarely disappoint. Following friends is different,  like playing a slot machine. Sometimes the content is great. Other times, with all the grandstanding, the experience makes me feel like a loser. 

“Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.”

-Susan Sontag

In the ephemeral stories feed that Snapchat pioneered, I can see a glimpse of the raw, authentic, playful space that made me fall in love with photo sharing to begin with: a break from self-promotion, and a return to self-expression. There are other fissures developing in the gamified, attention-hungry world of photo sharing that can indicate a future that amplifies connection over true “engagement”. Teens have finstas, influencers are rejecting the instagram aesthetic. And Instagram is hiding like counts. 

Music to my eyes

The future will bring more visual communication, not less. I don’t think we should all abandon our social feeds, but why not approach them mindfully? Most people usually post about the same few topics over and over. That means you are taking in the same images over and over, a self-induced hypnosis that may have the potential to change the way you relate to others and see yourself.

The moment has arrived where computers can learn and see. Computers are driving cars, sensing our emotions, making our camera rolls searchable, and creating houses full of mustaches. Artificial Intelligence will give us an array of opportunities to change how we create and consume photos and video. My hope is that we will use AI to get our impulses to line up with perceived moral values, instead of only underlining our lower level nervous systems.

I would love to see a future where enjoying photos becomes more like enjoying music. Spotify gives you an easy way to consider options by assessing your mood and putting together an appropriate playlist that feels personal. We could do the same for images. Can you imagine opening Spotify and having it blast a random song immediately? Our current Instagram home screen is the visual equivalent of a playlist mashup of country, classical, techno, hip hop, and polka. 

What if you could use AI to control the content in your feed? Dialing up or down whatever is most useful to you. If I’m on a budget, maybe I don’t want to see photos of friends on extravagant vacations. Or, if I’m trying to pay more attention to my health, encourage me with lots of salads and exercise photos. If I recently broke up with somebody, happy couple photos probably aren’t going to help in the healing process. Why can’t I have control over it all, without having to unfollow anyone. Or, opening endless accounts to separate feeds by topic. And if I want to risk seeing everything, or spend a week replacing my usual feed with images from a different culture, country, or belief system, couldn’t I do that, too? 

“Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people’s ways, you may even use them to find your own but you will have eventually to free yourself of them.”

-Paul Strand

Anthropologists in the future will be able to use Machine Learning to excavate our habits, likes, and dislikes from our extensive catalog of photos. What will they learn? I hope that from our avocado toasts, Rosé baths, and infinity pools, to our goofy selfies, pet portraits, and family trips, they will see that we found each other. Which is all that matters.

Or at least we’ll all look #blessed.