\u201cOkay, so I am a millennial, but I am an elder! Elder millennial! Wizened. Sage. Yes, gather \u2019round the Snapchat, children. I\u2019ll tell you the tale\u2026 of the landline.\u201d \ufeff<\/em><\/span><\/p>-Iliza Shlesinger<\/cite><\/blockquote> In the early 2000s, photo sharing meant carrying around a point-and-shoot camera, maybe even a DSLR. You\u2019d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019d shoot, say, an average night out like wedding photographers\u2014capturing everyone and everything. And you posted in part, so that other people could see themselves in your feed. <\/p>\n\n\n\n It was thrilling then, to make a \u201cpublic appearance\u201d online. The act of posting felt risky, and to participate online this way didn\u2019t only give us an understanding of other people, it also gave us a new way to understand ourselves. 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAnd 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.\u201d<\/em><\/span><\/p>-Erving Goffman (The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life)<\/cite><\/blockquote> If you look, you can see a whole spectrum of human ceremony and emotion played out in the art of people\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I don\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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.” <\/em> 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 \u201cengagement\u201d systems. A startup CEO I worked for shared an article from design ethicist Tristan Harris<\/a> 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. \u201cWhen you are the camera and the camera is you.\u201d<\/em> 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. 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<\/a>, 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 \u201cbefore\u201d 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. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Some of us have been possessed by a more fearful version Themed public photo studios self-referred to as \u201cexperiences<\/a>\u201d have popped up across major metropolitan cities. For a small fee, you can be photographed in an eye-popping bath of ros\u00e9 or ice cream sprinkles. I\u2019m 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><\/em>, 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.
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nSmoke signals, love letters, and emergency flares<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nImagine all the people, Sharing all the world\u2026
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<\/span><\/p>@buzz<\/a>\ufeff<\/cite><\/blockquote>
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<\/span><\/p> Minolta Advertisement (1976) <\/cite><\/blockquote>
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<\/figure>\n\n\n\nMy weekend was amazing, thanks
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of who we are and aim the camera at ourselves to make sure we are living.
I can\u2019t even say the word for what the picture is
called but it begins with self<\/span><\/p>-Michael Klein ( from his poem Harmonium)<\/cite><\/blockquote>
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