Social Distancing is Making Instagram Casual Again
It is once again acceptable to post weird things on the internet.
If you’re on Instagram, chances are you’ve noticed that lately, your feed has looked a bit…different. Instead of the influx of beaches, swimsuits, and palm trees that typically comes this time of year, the app is filled with “challenges” — #SeeAPupSendAPup, #See10Do10, the “positivity challenge,” and people drawing chains of vegetables and fruits. Yesterday, as I was following my daily isolation routine of doing absolutely nothing, I opened Instagram. And I was greeted by a stream of random, low-quality, even embarrassing photos of my friends and acquaintances. All captioned with the mysterious phrase “until tomorrow.” Um, did I miss something? Why does this look like my feed from 5th grade?
Luckily, a Google search quickly informed me that this was yet just another Instagram challenge. In this one, people have to post an embarrassing photo of themselves and leave it up for 24 hours. Okay, so that explains the captions. But like…why? Why is this a thing?
I guess one of the reasons these challenges have surprised me is because for the past few years, they’ve pretty much been off-limits. For most people over the age of 14 on Instagram, the name of the game is simple: make your life look as amazing as possible (this is a bit of a generalization, as there are of course people who don’t follow this approach or think about Instagram in this way). This is done through posting photos of oneself at parties, on tropical vacations, or with friends in the city. In fact, Instagram has become so socially important that a whole set of unwritten rules around it has developed: don’t post more than once a day, don’t use hashtags unironically, post selfies and use emojis sparingly, only include your VSCO, Snapchat, or school in your bio, don’t try to be too artsy or deep, don’t post too many stories, take down a photo if it doesn’t have enough likes, the list goes on.
The new Instagram trends break these rules. Stuck at home, self-quarantining admist the Coronavirus public health crisis, it is useless to try and pretend one’s life is great right now. Truth is, we’re all at home bored out of our minds — so bored, in fact that we’re willing to sacrifice all the hardwork we’ve put into crafting the perfect Instagram pages — in order to draw a carrot, orange, strawberry or other produce item on our stories. We’re also more likely to directly reach out to our friends on Instagram, by tagging them in the positivity challenge or variations of it. This makes sense — we haven’t seen them in person in a while, and we miss them! It reminds me of the time in which “like for a rate/TBH”’s were popular, or even things like this (which, even with Instagram becoming more casual, would definitely still be a social faux-pas today).
We have been brought back to a past era — 2013–2015 or so, in which we used Instagram not as a platform to share all the awesome moments of our lives, but rather — the forgettable ones. We posted embarrassing photos of ourselves as (even younger) kids, overly-filtered photos of flowers we thought were “artsy,” photos (and explanations) of failed adventures with our friends. It was an era in which we recognized and embraced the absurdity of life — of the world around us, of adolescence. We felt free to share and embrace our true selves, thoughts, and day-to-day experiences.
It’s possible we’ve slowly been getting back to this more carefree, casual Instagram era. In The Atlantic writer Taylor Lorenz’s article “The Instagram Aesthetic is Over,” she describes how today’s young people are gradually shifting to more authentic, unfiltered content (rather than the overly curated, avocado-toast-and-pink-wall feeds of the past).
Social distancing has perhaps accelerated this shift — and for many people, to see it occur so suddenly is surprising. Annoying, even:
And yeah, I guess these challenges can be annoying. But overall, I think this shift in Instagram is a good thing, and maybe even something to keep up when we are back hanging out with our friends and going on vacations again. It doesn’t have to mean putting weird drawings of carrots on our stories — it can just mean being more casual, more carefree, more willing to share our thoughts and passions and the “forgettable” moments of our life. It has become a common thing to feel self-conscious, even anxious because of Instagram or other social media — but it doesn’t have to be that way. We can make it work for us. We can make it creative, unfiltered, and perhaps most importantly — fun — again.
