Our Instagram feeds professionalised: the quality of photography improved, the captions were strategically wittier. The relationship to our real lives became more complicated.
There isn‘t a clean way to get around the idea that personal expression is always at least in part performative. Expression is partly fun because it’s performative.
It’s also not like this type of behavior is a new thing. There has always been the type of person who is performative of their own interests or pursues their work because of the kind of... See more
Today’s most vital cultural forms are your identity, personality, and image. And in this new cultural paradigm, the artist’s performance of themself is often more important than the art they make. The persona is the message.
"when the underlying message behind a photo isn’t just “I’m still alive and I want you to pay attention to me right now please,” but “this thing I’m sharing is making me feel really alive, and I’m excited to share it with you because I think it’s worth your attention.” (Nozlee Samadzadeh)
There are plenty of well-documented reasons to distrust Instagram — the platform where one is never not branding, never not making Facebook money, never not giving Facebook one’s data — but most unnerving are the ways in which it has led me to distrust myself. After countless adventures through the black hole, my propensity to share, perform, and... See more