Instagram Anxiety
2/1/19 - We watched both Fyre Festival documentaries. Beyond the quirks of those films we're left with qualms about the social media platforms that ensconce our lives, Instagram in particular. Tech companies evolve, their products change, but we don't have clear laws or norms that govern the many different digital lives we lead. We get into it about FOMO, the history of personal photography, features that tag your 'close friends' and old pictures, and their ties to capitalism. Plus, how we think about what we post, and the accounts we love to follow.
Transcript below.
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CREDITS
Producer: Gina Delvac
Hosts: Aminatou Sow & Ann Friedman
Theme song: Call Your Girlfriend by Robyn
Composer: Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs.
Associate Producer: Destry Maria Sibley
Visual Creative Director: Kenesha Sneed
Merch Director: Caroline Knowles
Editorial Assistant: Laura Bertocci
Ad sales: Midroll
LINKS
Revisionist History episode on the Birmingham sculpture
John Berger's Ways of Seeing
Early Kodak ads
TRANSCRIPT: Instagram anxiety
[Ads]
(1:00)
Aminatou: Welcome to Call Your Girlfriend.
Ann: A podcast for long-distance besties everywhere.
Aminatou: I'm Aminatou Sow.
Ann: And I'm Ann Friedman.
Aminatou: This week I want to talk about scams. This idea of FOMO and a feeling like you know everyone else is having fun without you or is participating in an iconic, cultural event or just doing something. And we're both a little confounded by this.
[Theme Song]
(1:52)
Aminatou: Bonjour Ann Friedman.
Ann: Hola.
Aminatou: [Laughs] One day we're going to get it right.
Ann: You know I'm fully trolling you right?
Aminatou: I know. I know. But it gets me every time.
Ann: You just want this family to be on the same page linguistically.
Aminatou: We have some announcements today. First announcement is do something nice for yourself.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: Second announcement is help us. Help us. We need your help. We don't ask for help a lot -- actually we probably do every week, but we need help for real. Tell the people what we need help with.
Ann: We have a listener survey we would love you to take. It is at callyourgirlfriend.com/survey. There are some questions about you that are just going to help us get a demographic picture of our audience and then there are also some questions about what you like about the show and what you want to see more of, topics you want us to cover. We're starting to really think about all of the cool things we're going to do in 2019 and so a great upside of you taking this survey is not just helping us but getting to have a little bit of say in what you listen to.
Aminatou: Right. It'll help us give you a better show so the audience should do this survey!
Ann: It takes five minutes. Callyourgirlfriend.com/survey.
Aminatou: Thanks y'all.
Ann: Okay what do you really want to talk about this week?
Aminatou: This week I want to talk about scams.
Ann: Please elaborate because I don't want to talk about Fyre Festival again.
Aminatou: [Laughs] Well, okay, we have both watched both Fyre Fest documentaries, the one on Hulu and the one on Netflix. The documentaries themselves were fine. Actually they weren't fine; they were flawed in these really sad kind of ways. Documentary is my favorite form of content and when all I see are just glaring editorial things that make me angry it makes me sad, especially for zeitgeisty things like this. But the thing is we don't actually care about Fyre Fest. You can read for yourself all the places on the Internet why they're bad or whatever.
Ann: The scam at the heart of that story is not what we're concerned about.
(3:55)
Aminatou: Right, we don't care about Bill McFarland because to be clear I don't think he's a cult leader; I just think he's a white kid who does cocaine and everybody around him is a liar.
Ann: Also can I tell you I keep mixing him up with that Family Guy guy?
Aminatou: Yes, oh, thank you.
Ann: Whenever I hear his name I'm like yeah, you went and made a kind of racist cartoon and now of course you're in trouble with this. I keep mixing them up.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Ann: Anyway, and also there's they weirdly look a little bit alike.
Aminatou: They 100% have the same scammer white man face. But so anyway, you know, the other scam that's going on in the Fyre Fest economy of it all, which is something that we've talked about before on this podcast, this idea of FOMO and a feeling like, you know, everyone else is having fun without you or is participating in an iconic cultural event or just doing something. And we're both a little confounded by this.
Ann: Yeah. And I would say also that one thing that was excellent about watching two documentaries about the same topic that were flawed in different ways is that it's a great opportunity for being a critical consumer of images and narrative which I think is also related to the idea of FOMO and whether you feel it when you are looking at your own Instagram. And it's more at the forefront in the Hulu documentary which one of the things that that documentary posits is that this wouldn't have been possible in a kind of pre-Instagram influencer era. Like this whole debacle is born of this era of social media and this particular way that people engage with celebrity which is a thesis I don't fully agree with but you know that seen where they have two "influencers" -- I'm air quoting -- two influencers who attended Fyre Festival and they're interviewing them separately about essentially their jobs or their role as influencers? And they ask them both "What is your brand?" Do you know the scene I'm talking about.
(5:55)
Aminatou: I know exactly what scene you're talking about because I had to drop my water I was laughing so hard.
Ann: Right. Two different people both kind of say like well, hmm . . .
Aminatou: Authenticity.
Ann: Positivity?
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Ann: Could have been edited in the most unfair, unflattering way but also, you know, is one of those things that is actually a scene that stuck out to me more than the iconic cheese sandwich from Fyre Festival.
Aminatou: I know. So I watched the Hulu one before I watched the Netflix one and I think the Hulu one, the thing it does very well is contextualize Fyre Fest in the time that we're in. I don't agree . . .
Ann: You mean this cultural moment?
Aminatou: Yeah, this cultural -- this [French accent] moment. This cultural moment. [Laughs] And so . . .
Ann: I thought that was a neighborhood in Paris.
Aminatou: Stop trolling me! We're sitting on the same couch and I want to leap at you. The reason I don't buy that is musical festivals or experiences like this are not new. What's that one in upstate New York?
Ann: Woodstock?
Aminatou: Yes, Woodstock. I'm too young to know about Woodstock. My favorite character in the Netflix one made this comment that was essentially like "People died at Woodstock and it was awful or whatever but does that mean it shouldn't have happened?"
[Clip Starts]
Male: The last 24 hours were unbelievable. All I kept thinking about was Woodstock. Think of that musical festival. Does anybody talk about the hundreds and hundreds of cars that were stuck on the throughway for days? Does anybody talk about the mudslides? How many people died of overdoses? Does anybody talk about the lack of food? Almost no water? Absolutely not. And I thought you know what, if Woodstock could get through that and from a publicity perspective land where it did Fyre Festival can make it.
[Clip Ends]
(7:40)
Aminatou: And part of me was like no, that's bad! White people are crazy.
Ann: Woodstock, an iconic white event.
Aminatou: Yeah, an iconic white event. But so I don't buy that millennials are gullible or a new gullible generation or that this idea that you see somebody doing something and you want to be part of it is new. I do think that technology makes it easier, accelerates it, and also amplifies the message faster but people be going to Woodstock, you know what I mean? And they figured that out without Instagram.
Ann: Right, enough people had FOMO to hitchhike to Woodstock.
Aminatou: Exactly.
Ann: So FOMO was not new. But I do think the point about the speed at which it can happen, and I do think that it was made in kind of a clunky way but part of the point about -- that the Hulu documentary was trying to make is yeah, but it can also be engineered now more easily. i.e. you can pay for hundreds of people who all have a certain number of followings to all post at the same time about something and get the kind of buzz that took Woodstock weeks to build among rando hippies or whatever, you know?
Aminatou: [Laughs] Right. But that's like the heart of it to me is everybody at every point in history has been susceptible to marketing. And I think the reason that I chafe so much at both of those documentaries is while they did try to explain that a little bit it wasn't tied into a larger cultural conversation that we have about the dangers of the stuff. So the agency that was involved in making Fyre Fest big is Jerry Media.
Ann: The marketing agency.
Aminatou: The marketing agency which a lot of people on Instagram follow, Fuck Jerry, this account that basically just steals memes and jokes from people. And I bet you that most people think that Fuck Jerry is just one guy, you know, one guy just making memes from his house. And it's like no, no, this is an entire marketing agency.
Ann: Like no, it's five guys in hoodies, not just one.
Aminatou: Right, oh my god. But you know like this idea that an agency can make you feel that the content is so relatable, that it's on a one-to-one touch level, and not something that's actually an engineered experience, that scares me a little that a lot of people don't realize that. Because if you think about a lot of things that went wrong in the 2016 election and the way that Russian bots are just going around fucking with our elections left and right I'm like this is the same extinct, it's the same kind of social engineering, and we're all part of that ecosystem. It just really concerns me that we're not all on the same page about how dangerous this is. So to watch the Family Guy/Fyre Fest guy go to jail and the marketing agency bros . . .
Ann: The other other McFarland.
(10:25)
Aminatou: Yeah, the other other McFarland. But to watch the agency bros be like "Oh yeah, we were hoodwinked too and we were swindled," I'm like hmm, no, you created the narrative that makes all of this -- like any of this possible. And that's a little frightening.
Ann: A couple of years ago, 2016, which now feels like a lifetime ago.
Aminatou: That was three years ago. Whew.
Ann: I know. Even though we're still obviously, you know, Russian meddling, the constant that unites that time and this time [Laughter] we had an episode called JOMO, Joy of Missing Out.
Aminatou: My philosophy.
Ann: I know. But I do think that all of the kind of meta conversation about Fyre Festival and how did it happen and who's responsible and then the conversation about the documentaries and this deeper point about essentially visual and media literacy is one that I remain very interested in. Even if you and I are both JOMO people to the core the point is there are all these statistics, we see them every day, about how everyone is miserable because of social media and feeling FOMO.
Aminatou: Yeah, you know? And it's been really funny because you and I offline -- off mic -- we talk obviously a lot about how we interact with our own social media. Like my dark arts is marketing and PR. That's literally what I did for a decade so as far as I'm concerned I have -- I'm vaccinated against a lot of this stuff because I used to make a lot of the junk that people consume/I'm like I just know a little more than everyone else when it comes to this stuff. But I have been really surprised how even recently anxiety about social media is slipping into my life and it is happening for me on a platform that used to be the most delightful place in the world which is Instagram. I thought that I had curated for myself an Instagram that was mostly like it's delightful things I want to buy, it's actual real friends that I have and I love seeing the world through their eyes. Like my favorite thing on Instagram is just seeing how my friends see the world. You know, and following people who make me laugh.
(12:35)
And so I always thought that I was fully in control of that and watching how the algorithm works now or the tools that they're introducing, i.e. close friends, and all of this stuff is making me a little bit unsure. And, you know, it's been a journey trying to really figure out what is actually going on.
Ann: Oh my god, I have so much anxiety and so many unresolved feelings about Instagram as well.
Aminatou: Unresolved feelings is perfect.
Ann: Yeah. Anxiety is maybe the wrong term. I have a kind of shifting with the winds feeling about it and yeah, like you it used to be a space where I just enjoyed myself. It was sort of like stoner brain, I look at funny things or keep tabs with my friends in a way that's divorced from the comment threads on Facebook. And it didn't feel like work to me the way Twitter always did. Like Twitter is my professional water cooler and that's it. I'm like I go there because other journalists are hanging out there.
Aminatou: Sick. [Laughs]
Ann: I know. But look, this is my profession, a sick profession okay?
Aminatou: Sick.
Ann: Yeah, but I think that has started to shift where it is increasingly clear to me that Instagram is a public platform for me because even though my account is locked I accept follows from people who don't have outward markings of being awful MAGA people or bots. The threshold's pretty low. And I tend to kind of feel -- this is a real old-school blog Internet philosophy of if you have to . . . if you put up one speed bump to entry you'll get rid of most horrible people. Not all, but like a lot of horrible people. And I think people will respect the space a little bit more which means I will have to spend less time deleting horrible things in comments or whatever which for the most part has been kind of true. But what I did not resolve after making that decision was I have now decided to make this a public kind of work platform frankly, like something that feels more akin to maybe how I would use Twitter and talk to other journalists. And it is not the same thing for me as just sharing with my friends about my life anymore. It's a very weird problem to have because I feel bad complaining about that, like so many people want to follow me. I feel bad about it now. I think of myself as working in two media forms which is the written word and audio, and Instagram is a visual platform. And so even though I am fine to post nice photos for my friends I feel a lot of conflicted feelings about having a visual platform be a primary work platform for me. And that is way too much information about me and Instagram.
(15:20)
Aminatou: Yeah, that's -- I'm like processing that. I think part of what it is is that . . . I mean what has always bothered me about The Internet (TM), Al Gore's Internet, is that you make these choices to join platforms or to join water coolers. You make them from a place of personal preference, like all of my friends are here or this looks like a delight. Or yes, I would like to find out about Tick Tock as well.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: But we were promised this weird democracy, the Greek square where everybody's idea is important or . . .
Ann: The marketplace of ideas.
(16:00)
Aminatou: Yeah, it's like the marketplace of ideas, or you just think that you're making decisions as an individual. You're like oh, a place I can post a sandwich I eat every day. Great. And you don't fully realize the implications that they have because the platforms are manipulative. So I don't think that -- the fact that you are going through all of these stages is indicative of the fact that Instagram has changed.
Ann: Yeah, yeah.
Aminatou: Like the thing that they sold you when you joined that platform years ago.
Ann: Which was Friend TV. Just watch your friends like you would watch TV, yeah.
Aminatou: Exactly. Watch your friends. There were a couple of people who followed you. You knew everybody who you were following or you aspire to know them or whatever. When we joined Instagram they didn't sell ads. There was no sponsored content. There was no segregate your friends and your not-friends. There wasn't a way to DM people that you didn't know. And so as the platforms evolve people also change their behavior around them and a lot of the platform change incentivizes that user behavior change. And part of it . . .
Ann: You mean encourages people to follow strangers and interact with them, yeah.
Aminatou: That's all they're doing. The entire algorithm is geared towards showing people that you don't know so that there's more eyeballs for ads they want to sell. That's fully what is going on here. That's why it's frustrating when all you want to follow really is your new friend's baby account but Instagram is like "Sorry, that account is locked. We don't care." They don't serve you that content. They serve you these stories of people you've never seen before. The discover feed, they tell you that it's interests that you have. And that is really manipulative and we don't know how to contend with that as a society. And the other thing too is that on the Internet in general we all joined at various times since Al Gore invented it.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: But we never had -- there was no on-boarding to the Internet so people all have different behaviors, like online behaviors that they have. And as a society we've kind of never discussed what is acceptable or not. There's like Emily posts for the real world. Everybody knows or everybody should know that you can't bring a plus one to the wedding if you haven't talked to the people about it, right? Everybody knows that. Not everybody knows that when you tweet about something or someone quietly and you don't tag them, somebody responding to you and tagging that person in the conversation is snitching and it's wrong. There are just these behaviors that irk us or things that you think are not cool or not okay but we've never had really etiquette around them and we've never had to contend with the fact that the Internet is also real life and that real life behavior comes into this space and we all make assumptions about them.
(18:30)
So to me between that and then the platform just wanting your advertising eyes the anxiety is just rising every day because the thing that you signed up for is no longer the thing that you're on and taking yourself out is kind of not fair.
Ann: Yeah. And god, I feel a certain amount of relief just hearing you say that honestly. You know, because it's very easy for me to say like oh, these are the things that have changed in my life or my approach to how I do my job or how I do the Internet in the past few years and it's really easy for me to forget that there are also capitalism-driven changes to the Internet itself. Like I know it's dumb, I read things about this all the time, and for some reason when I'm actually grappling with the questions of what to post and how and what is appropriate on what platform I never think about the macro questions of who wants me to do what?
Aminatou: Oh, and there are literally hundreds of behaviorists and engineers and marketers who they stay up at night wanting you to have a certain kind of behavior to a thing that they have built. So when I saw for example the close friends roll out on Instagram a part of me was like great, finally, I can have a list where I follow my real people or make content geared towards them. My tech brain said wow, I am telling this company who all my close friends are so that they can sell them the exact same kind of advertising that they sell to me. Or when I see people at the end of the year do things like your best nine photos or the ten year challenge all I'm thinking about is how AI is mining all of this to do face recognition, to figure out the places that you hang out and stuff like that and it is terrifying. And part of me is like well, I wish that we could teach this at scale and everybody could learn but at the same time the onus should not be on the individual users to feel that they have to do everything. We have to hold our platforms to account and right now we're not doing any of it.
(20:38)
Any time a tech CEO goes to Congress the congresspeople don't even know how to attach a photo to email. You know, that's where they're at and they don't know what's going on and we're being manipulated all the time. And it actually has real life implications and serious mental health implications for a lot of people's lives.
[Music and Ads]
(23:43)
Ann: So I'm going to read this little bit from a 2017 study in the UK, a country-wide survey of 14- to 24-year-olds asking them about their habits with the five biggest social media platforms at the time, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Snapchat, and Instagram. And they ranked how their use of the platforms affected the quality of their sleep, their FOMO, their body image, a bunch of other metrics.
Aminatou: Hmm.
Ann: Which on the one hand I'm like super interesting trying to take a holistic look. On the other hand I'm like I don't fucking know which what thing affects how I feel about whatever. You know, we all live in the world where we're looking at something on our phone one minute and then looking at an ad somewhere else the next minute and then talking to a human being the next so how do you separate? But this study is one that's frequently cited when people want to talk about Instagram being particularly bad for mental health as the study where Instagram came last, scoring particularly badly for its affects on sleep, body image, and FOMO. You know we have these few studies of a couple thousand people, usually very young people, that are never really juxtaposed with the kind of thing you're talking about in terms of the company's aims. They're always juxtaposed with stories about how millennials can't get it together or something that has to do with personal lifestyle choices.
Aminatou: Right. And it's so interesting too because I guess the reason that this bums me out so much is that when I look at Instagram and I see a perfectly curated life, like somebody who I'm like the sandwich is popping, the bed is made, the outfit is bomb, all of it . . .
Ann: All I hope is you someday look at my Instagram and say the sandwich is popping. I need to post more sandwich content.
Aminatou: Ann your sandwich content is always popping but also you don't need to put it on Instagram because you text it to me.
Ann: It is so true.
Aminatou: But when I see that the first thing that always comes to mind is like great composition. A++. There are technical terms for it. Unlike the song I don't believe that anybody wakes up like that.
Ann: Mm-hmm.
Aminatou: And I think that is, again, technology is bad for many reasons but this thing is not just technology; it is human instinct, you know? To look at people and to think that they're doing better, like the grass is always greener somewhere else. And then somehow, you know, some people just have Instagram boyfriends who take perfect photos of them and you think that's the real life. The one thing that the Internet is good at if you are using it successfully is that that's where you show your best self, right? It's like it's edited. It's whatever you think your best self is, do it. That's why I never abide by mean people online. I'm like you don't have to be mean here; you can be an amazingly nice person. Be mean to the people in your real life. I don't need this shit.
Ann: [Laughs]
(26:30)
Aminatou: You know what I mean? This is where we all edit to lie about what's going on. I just didn't realize that we weren't all on the same page about that.
Ann: It turns out people edit for different things. People find different things compelling or important.
Aminatou: Right. It's also interesting to look at especially people that you know sometimes, like what's going on with them online, and to reach out in person to see how they're doing. Like I know that for me everybody's always like "Amina, your Instagram stories are great." And I'm like yeah, no shit. It's like a sign of anxiety and mania. Are you serious? Nobody should have this much just junk on their phone that they're trying to get rid of. On one hand the reason why I love Instagram stories is because as you know I am OCD. Like for real diagnosed OCD. And part of it is I take these pictures, I like to see them on my phone, but I need them to disappear. And putting them somewhere where they live temporarily for 24 hours 100% scratches that itch for me. I'm like it's here. It's gone now. I love this.
But the truth of it is that it's also -- most of the time I'm at a doctor's appointment waiting for something or I'm having a very manic kind of day. And there are a few people who notice that who are friends with me very closely and go "Hey, are you doing okay?" I'm like "No, I'm not doing great. Do you see what is going on here? [Laughs] My life is a mess." Like we are all laughing about it but this wild. And so the ways that you are incentivized -- like the rewards that social media offers, I think we need to interrogate that a little bit more. You know, and to say "Oh, hey, do you feel lonely that you are posting all of this amazingly perfect content? Like too many selfies, what does that indicate? What is the message behind the curation that you're doing?" And I hope everybody has people close to them who are asking these real questions because it's not always pretty all the time.
(28:20)
Ann: Yeah, it's interesting. So I'm thinking not only of the question of stories which is a little bit different but overall what are your -- in a space like Instagram that is I think a little bit more undefined in terms of is it supposed to be private? Is it supposed to be professional? It is both for many people. How do you decide which parts of yourself to share with the world? Or like in this case now which parts of yourself to share with only this very lucrative close friends list?
Aminatou: I used to share thinking that the only people who saw my Instagram were my close friends. My Instagram was always -- actually it was not always public but it's been public for a really long time and I always imagined that it was like you and Gina and seven other people. [Laughs] That's what I thought was going on. And then I actually looked at the follower account one day and I was like oh, this is actually a lot of people. It's mostly probably all Russian bots but it's also a lot of eyeballs. And so generally my calculus now for how I share that is if it's something that I don't mind the whole world knowing it's fine. Like if it's something that I have resolved feelings about it's fine. The place where I feel usually the most conflicted is how I share about not me on the Internet, you know what I mean? So photos of other friends, photos of other friends' children which P.S. you should always ask your friends before you post pictures of their children on the Internet.
Ann: Or themselves, yeah.
(29:42)
Aminatou: Yeah, but especially the kids. And that's why close friends has been so interesting to me. I would say on my close friends list there's probably less than 100 people or right around 100 people and I would say that they're all friends.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: I mean IRL friends. Some of them are online-only friends but they're friends. They're people who I'm like would I invite you to dinner at my house? Absolutely. Would I have dinner with you alone at my house? That's the criteria. That's a space where for me has been really freeing because it means you don't have to tag people, you know? You don't have to explain really anything. You don't have to contextualize anything. Because even that act of tagging someone sometimes, I'm like that is just feeding into the FOMO economy. Like oh, look who Ann is friends with. Who's this person? Click on it. Find out. You know, you are just like . . .
Ann: You're like oh, turns out I already know this person. [Laughs]
Aminatou: You know what I mean? It's just adding more people into the web. And so the way I have liked that feature where I feel like I am the most myself right now, it's that it's a place where I don't have to contextualize anybody or anything and I can just share. But I know that not everybody uses it the same way. I was talking to a very close friend recently and she was saying that that feature actually gives her so much anxiety because all she can think about is which close friends' feeds am I not a part of? What else is going on? Here's another new intimate space that I'm not a part of. And I was like wow, thank you for giving me that anxiety now because I didn't have it before. And so it's very interesting, right? But back to your question I think that I feel very conflicted about it. I don't know. I'm figuring it out as I go. One feature that I do love on Instagram is that sometimes you can block it so nobody can comment on a photo and I wish they would also do that for the like count where you just couldn't see it because that's not why I use it. I don't actually care how many people engage with it. The only thing that feature does for me when I do see how many people like it is it reminds me that it's not just for me and that maybe I should've kept it to myself. So I don't quite know.
(31:48)
Ann: Yeah. I really don't like if I can sense that people want my lifestyle, I know that sounds dumb, but something that . . .
Aminatou: It's not dumb, Ann. Do you know how many people always tell me "Oh, I want Ann's -- I want to be a freelancer like her. I want to be a journalist like her." And I'm like bitch, Ann been in these trenches for years. [Laughs]
Ann: Right. And I'm sort of like while I don't feel the need to document myself working lots of hours or what I look like when I get up super early to record a thing before I write something, while I don't feel upset that I don't have selfies from early days of my freelance life when it was very hard for me to make ends meet and I was saying yes to all kinds of fucked-up women's magazine assignments just because the dollar amount seemed higher but there's no price you can put on your soul, I . . .
Aminatou: There is a price for my soul. Please inquire within. [Laughter]
Ann: I mean right, so that's one example right? Of now being like oh, I feel really great about the work that I put in to get to the place where I am now where you and I get to work together and I get to have a kind of flexible lifestyle and I do have more freedom to say no to things. How do you . . . I mean maybe it's like the multi-photo slideshow of having the next photo be like hello, here is my bank account from 2013 and this is where I -- you know what I mean?
Aminatou: Ooh child.
Ann: It's a very weird context. I think that's what I'm trying to say is I really struggle with wanting to use it as . . . I mean I am drawn to posting things when I'm happy about something.
Aminatou: Of course.
Ann: Of course. And I think that that's a natural feeling, and at the same time I am not wanting to be any kind of barometer by which other people judge themselves just as I don't judge myself by what other people have going on when I'm my best self. So I think it's very hard to try to figure that out and I also think that it's -- Instagram is a hard place for me as someone who would like to be in conversation about or talking about the ideas I'm thinking about lately. Like that kind of . . . it can be hard for me to figure out how to translate that to a predominantly visual medium sometimes. Some of it is like I'm still learning the ways I want to use it in frankly a professional way.
Aminatou: It's people like you who ruin all platforms. The minute journalists join they're always like "How do I make this about work?" [Laughs]
(34:15)
Ann: I don't know how to tell you this but I would be totally happy -- I have to have now my other account for all my fun stuff only. I would be totally happy if Instagram were never a work account, but guess what? It's happening.
Aminatou: I know, but it's always like . . .
Ann: You and I have a book to sell imminently, okay? I'm like not abandoning ship.
Aminatou: It's always been my grand theory that the decline of every social platform happens when journalists find it. It's when everything starts going under. Same thing happened on Twitter, happened on MySpace, happened on Friend ster.
Ann: [Laughs]
Aminatou: I'm like let us have our platforms! Joking aside I really appreciate you saying that thing though about not wanting to be the barometer that people judge themselves by because I think you just vocalize really well what actually my main anxiety about the whole thing is is whenever I see people who live very boldly outward lives, like a live out loud, which you know I'm like we're part of that economy, all I really think is wow, you are a brave gladiator. You are really brave for being in the arena. It is hard to want to share your ideas and work with the world. I know we make it look fun all the time but it's not glamorous all the time.
Like I think about when we were on tour, all of that travel and how just awful it is and people going like "Oh my god, always jetting off somewhere!" And I'm like do you want to be here? This life is hard. And I know it sounds like smallest violin -- like first-world smallest violins but it actually isn't. When I think about what I am doing on social media I really hope that part of it is people realizing that I . . . every time I open up about a vulnerability I have or a thing that I think I suck at or something, you know, the piece where you're like I'm trying to be an authentic person here, I am doing that because I want to give other people permission to do the same for themselves you know? You shouldn't aspire to have anybody else's life. Everybody else's life is hard. I don't even want to be Oprah. Can you imagine? I don't want to be anybody. Do the best you can with what you have because people are out here struggling and the more public they live their lives the harder it actually is. I'm like I don't want to be somebody that people look at and think that I have it all together or that I'm somebody to aspire to. I'm like my life is literally a mess. You don't want to trade with me. But I hope that you can feel compassion for me and you can feel compassion for yourself.
Ann: Yeah.
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(37:40)
Ann: One of my very oldest and dearest friends Lara Shipley is an assistant professor of photography at Michigan State University and she and I had a lot of conversations when she first started teaching the basically like photo 101 class there because in the past I think it was a class where people would learn how to like develop stuff in the dark room or maybe learn the rule of thirds in composing a photo. And she has this challenge of hey, guess what? In this moment everyone's a photographer. There's not a single student in her class who isn't already making photos all the time.
Aminatou: Yeah, I've got apps to make old-timey photos. I've been a photographer. [Laughter]
Ann: Listen. And so, you know, part of her challenge is helping her students look critically at all of the photos they see in the world. And I think for a lot of them a primary place they're seeing photos is Instagram. So I called her up to ask her how she communicates some of these ideas to them and how she's teaching them to think more critically about what they see.
[Interview Starts]
Ann: Hi Lara.
Lara: Hi Ann!
Ann: So I'm hoping you can start off by talking a little bit about why it's important to you that your students know how to talk and think critically about something like Instagram and not just like frame a photo using the rule of thirds or do an amazing lay flat that all of their friends will like?
Lara: Yeah. So I'm teaching a fine art photography class, or classes, and this is something I've kind of been starting off recently with my beginning photography class which has been traditionally focusing on like a lot of photography 1 classes landscape, portraiture, dealing with the fine art photography canon and stuff like that.
Ann: Artistic photos of manhole covers? That's what I think of when I think of my photo 101 experience.
Lara: That does happen. Bike racks, you know? [Laughter] Lots of cats, etc. It's cool. But I've only been teaching for a few years and I'm just thinking more and more that the way we look at photographs is just the same whether that photograph is in a gallery or on our phone or a mugshot or part of the news. They're all photographs. Our brain is inputting them in a really similar way. So if you get well-versed thinking critically about all the photographs around you not only is that going to make it easier for being a human today, because we are surrounded by photographs and have to deal with them, but I think it'll also make you a better photographer because you are thinking about how these things apply across contexts.
(40:25)
Ann: If you were thinking of each of our personal output of photos as not all that different from a professional photographer's body of work, in practical terms . . .
Lara: Right.
Ann: How do you get them to see it that way? Because I think to a lot of people it's like yeah, this is just life. I take photos. I keep photos. I post some of them. Sure.
Lara: Yeah, I think it's actually really challenging is what I'm finding out. A year ago we were working on making portraits as their studio project and I was like in conjunction with this why don't you choose a person on Instagram who's like a public persona or a company that has an Instagram persona and talk about the way they're using photography to develop that persona and portray it? And talk about it exactly the way we are learning to talk about fine art photography. What are they choosing to show? So the edit, the selection. Are they using particular colors? Lighting? All these things that we used to analyze how we're reading a photo, just apply that to these other people. It did not go well. [Laughs] You know, they gave their presentations and they were like this person is like this and this person is like that. And I'm like . . .
Ann: Meaning what? Like Kim Kardashian likes wearing beige and parting her hair down the middle? Is that what you mean or . . .
(41:48)
Lara: Totally, yeah. Like not like this is how she's portraying herself but this is who she is, you know?
Ann: Ah.
Lara: I remember this one boy who was clearly so smitten with Emilia Clarke I think from Game of Thrones.
Ann: Uh-huh.
Lara: The dragon lady. That's who he chose and he was talking about her account and how down-to-earth she was and really goofy and just seemed like she's just a fun, laid-back person you know?
Ann: Uh-huh.
Lara: It's like no kind of awareness, especially someone like that. I'm sure there's like a publicist involved. This is all intentional. This is her putting that forth in a very sophisticated way. And they can see it more with Beyonce or Kim Kardashian who those images feel so stylized but when the style feels candid, when it feels like pictures that they make, totally throws them.
Ann: To take this Emilia Clarke example.
Lara: Yeah.
Ann: What did you say then when the student was like "Hey, she seems so chill?" [Laughs] What did you say to kind of interrogate that or how do you get that to the next level of like hmm, maybe she's someone is choosing photos that just look a certain way and we have no idea what her life is like?
Lara: Right. I keep just trying to bring it back to the photos. Okay, not who she is but what in the photo is making you read chill? What in the photo is making you read goofy? How is that photograph taken to make you feel that way? What kinds of expressions? You know, these sorts of things. And this is something that I think comes up all semester long with every class I teach, just with photography in general, is just that people still see them as this window to the world, as this like little bit of reality, not as like something that's authored. And so, you know, honestly those conversations just take time to kind of work through because it's confusing because we're so used to seeing photography that way. Even some famous art theorists and critics since the beginning of photography have just been like oh, it's a science. It's documenting the world. Photographers can't be authors, right? They're just like camera mechanics pushing buttons. Yeah. This is one of the reasons why I think fine art photography has tried so hard to separate itself from amateur photography and trying to be seen as different. But it's not. Fine art photographers maybe -- hopefully -- sometimes I think are more aware that they're authoring something but I think everybody is who's taking pictures. Especially when they're choosing to share the picture. They're editing, picking out, selecting this is the one I want to share. There's a lot of decisions that go into that.
(44:48)
Ann: So what are the things that -- the resources or the skills that you . . . I mean I'm not trying to get you to condense an entire class that people pay good American public university dollars to take [Laughter] into a two-minute blurb but I am curious if it's like okay, I'm listening to you. I am hearing what you're saying. I want to become more just aware as I'm looking at something like Instagram that I have the impression is less stylized than maybe an ad I see. How do I develop that skill and are there resources that you use? How did you get through to this poor soul who loves Emilia Clarke so much?
Lara: [Laughs] Well, I don't know, I've honestly struggled to find a good resource because I think we're so in the middle of it, you know? So there's like a million articles written about social media and how social media is positive, how it's negative, and of course I think you guys made a good point that social media is different for everybody. It depends on how you're using it.
Ann: Right, it's like your social media is really what's operative. Yeah.
Lara: Right, right. If you're just following cute animals maybe it is a totally relaxing experience, you know? [Laughter]
Ann: Is that the answer? You're like just follow animals only. You're like red fox Instagram. Or red panda. I forget which one you like. Whatever, yeah.
Lara: I like red panda. I'm partial to chill wildlife. I enjoy . . .
Ann: Okay, but so if you're not going to go full chill wildlife only on your Instagram what -- yeah.
Lara: I think it's important just to try to be more aware when you're looking at photographs. This is what I try to do, because I'm just like everyone else, I look at a photograph and I think oh, this is that thing. I just try to slow down a little bit because it's really hard to do that because you look at so many, but especially if you have a photograph that might change your mind about something, be important to your way of looking at the world, just slow down. Try to think about what's going on? Are we getting the full context? Might this be confusing? Let's see, Malcolm Gladwell has a nice podcast. His Revisionist History has an episode on a photograph that was turned into a statue. It's the one of the police dog nipping the back of the black boy's pants.
Ann: Mm-hmm.
Lara: I really recommend listening to that. I think it is a really good example of how confusing context can be and once an image is frozen you can't look around. You can't see what happened before, what happened after. You just have that moment and how those moments can be really tough.
A couple other people I like who write about photography, Trevor Paglen, Teju Cole for the New York Times. It's hard to find something that's really put this all together so I'm also writing a book about it.
Ann: Yes! Oh my god. The only thing I ever want to hear is that the person I know who is smartest about a thing is making a thing so other people can read about it.
Lara: Oh shucks.
Ann: I was also going to big up Ways of Seeing.
Lara: Oh my god, yes of course. Yes. Everyone should go home -- or who is at home -- and watch Ways of Seeing immediately. It's on YouTube. Yeah, I mean John Berger, brilliant. I mean he's the one -- starts Ways of Seeing by saying our first language is images. First we see images and then we learn language, then we learn to speak. And I think that's so important when you're thinking about photography that we're not having to think about the way we're interpreting it; we're just interpreting.
(48:30)
Ann: Right, so slow down. I also feel like that is not what Instagram is built for.
Lara: No, no.
Ann: The number -- how fast the thumb flick goes. This is a skill I've used more with Twitter than Instagram where as soon as I start feeling like I kind of want to jump out of my skin or I start feeling bad about myself which is a thing that happens once I hit a certain hour point on social media . . .
Lara: Yeah.
Ann: That's how I know oh, god, it's the feeling within me that tells me to either look closer or completely look away. And I think if you're looking at something on Instagram and you're like this is making me feel like garbage maybe the answer could be either to close it or to be like what am I not seeing that's probably a part of this story?
Lara: Yeah. It is not normal to human history to spend this amount of time looking at images. You know images didn't even exist a couple hundreds years ago and now it's like yeah, I've probably already looked at 100 images today, you know? It's not normal. So I think yeah, we have to kind of be aware of how this is working on us. It's hard when it's a part of being an engaged human being.
Ann: Right.
Lara: The opt out can feel really impossible, right? So it's like what is -- what do you do?
Ann: So I think for me part of this is also about thinking a little bit harder about what I choose to post and why and what message or lack therefore I am trying to send. And I think that some of the accounts on Instagram I like the most are the ones that even when they post a photo of themselves looking fabulous they kind of acknowledge all of the complicated things that are happening that you don't see outside the frame, like with the words and the caption. And I would love to hear you talk a little bit more about the history of what we've been trained to take pictures of and want to share because that's not something that, as you point out, photography at this level is new. It's not like we have an innate sense of what is what we want to share. And so maybe you can talk about where the impulse to share certain things comes from?
(50:34)
Lara: Yeah. One of the first easy to use amateur -- considered to be an amateur camera, so a camera that you could use if you were not like a scientist or, you know, some sort of specialist, the Kodak Brownie changed the culture from going to a portrait studio to get a photograph taken to something that you're all of a sudden able to do on your own. So it made it easy. It had a roll of film and you could send the film into the lab pretty much the way photography has been until fairly recently. So this is new. People before had been, like I said, they would go in formally dressed, get a portrait made.
Ann: Like super serious Victorian face.
Lara: Well they also had to hold super still you know?
Ann: Right.
Lara: So it's like yeah, super serious, like I've been here for a solid 40 seconds holding my breath. [Laughter] So it's like a really different relationship to photography. Very formal. This technology brought in this totally new kind of photography which is . . .
Ann: The Kodak Brownie you're talking about?
Lara: The Kodak Brownie, yeah. Part of what they had to do was teach people how to use it. So they had this ad campaign that started essentially teaching people what to do with the technology.
Ann: What to do with a personal camera essentially?
(51:55)
Lara: Yeah, their very own camera. And the ads tend to feature women as the photographers and specifically chroniclers of their family, so that's what the camera was for. Create this document of your home life. And they featured women because they wanted to show how easy it was to use.
Ann: Aww, silly lady brains can operate it.
Lara: I know, even a woman. Sometimes they're like even your kids, you know? It's like women and children.
Ann: God.
Lara: I know, I know. But I think it's really interesting to Google those old ads and take a look at the kinds of images that they use and the taglines. They were holidays, beach vacation, special fun happy moments. And there was a real emphasis on two things: 1) if you don't photograph it it didn't happen, and 2) photograph the good stuff.
Ann: Wow, we're talking like this is 150 years ago or whatever.
Lara: Yeah.
Ann: And that is the norm. I love how people are like ugh, in this era of positivity.
Lara: [Laughs]
Ann: And it's like no, no.
Lara: Totally, yeah. No, this is just how we've been taught through capitalism to use this tool.
Ann: Wow.
Lara: And we're still using it the exact same way. You know, and so what I found was real interesting is as I was doing that reading up on those ads I was looking at the most popular photographs on Instagram a few months ago -- this is pre- the infamous egg thing -- but at that time the two most popular images were Kylie Jenner at the hospital with her new baby, so family, right? And then Beyonce, the pregnancy photo. So really those topics, the family, the happy memories, positivity, right? All go back from that, our early origins of using this as amateurs.
(53:55)
Ann: Right. And weirdly on this platform that's designed for sharing amateur photography but clearly both of these people -- both Kylie and Beyonce -- women who have gotten very wealthy by being in very savvy control of their own image.
Lara: Oh yeah. There's nothing amateur about what they're doing.
Ann: Sure.
Lara: They're completely highly sophisticated in their use of the medium. Yeah. And they're like yeah, they're the best at it.
Ann: Wow. So now I feel like we can blame capitalism which is where we love to end up for everything.
Lara: Oh sure. [Laughter]
Ann: Where I'm like it's not that we personally are unable to separate Emilia Clarke's fun, chill life from Emilia Clarke's press release.
Lara: Right, right.
Ann: It is really just the trickery of capitalism for literally decades and decades and decades.
Lara: You know how fine art photography is sort of characterized as like sad faces?
Ann: Yeah, or serious face is a more serious photo. Totally.
Lara: Right, right. I feel like this is just another response, another way to distinguish them from what amateurs are doing. But in a sense it is still kind of coming from the same place, right? It's like a reaction to this early encouragement on the way to use a camera. We're all participants in this culture.
Ann: Yeah.
Lara: Yeah.
Ann: Ugh, okay Lara, I'm already preordering your book in my mind. I can't wait to read it.
Lara: Aw, thank you.
Ann: And thank you for talking about this today.
Lara: My pleasure.
[Interview Ends]
Ann: Okay, I'm going to hit you with one of my personal big revelatory takeaways from that conversation.
Aminatou: [Laughs]
Ann: Which is the problem is obviously not excessive photos or Instagram itself but I do have a problem with kind of the influencer construct and the idea of a whole account being built around one human being's presumed lifestyle even though it is clearly a controlled narrative about that. And so I take the most delight in following accounts that are kind of editorial, that have one thing that they're setting out to do and it's really clear what they're doing and they do it really well.
(56:00)
Aminatou: Right, like have a specific point-of-view. Have a story to tell me. I love Instagram accounts where I learn something.
Ann: What is one of your favs?
Aminatou: One of my favs is @chuckmonsey who showcases a lot of queer people and a lot of people of color. He just has a very specific aesthetic and a point-of-view and it's one of those appointment Instagram accounts for me where at the end of the day or if I'm feeling like I'm having a down day I just go and I scroll through it again because you should always be learning. And I think that's very, very, very important.
Ann: Ugh, yeah. A person in my extended friend group Niki Ford has a great Instagram account called Niki Ford Cooks which is just like little kitchen tips and good recipes. I learn a lot from her. I like to eat the same things as Niki does so that's one reason it's great. I love the stoner classic account @ifyouhigh.
Aminatou: @ifyouhigh. @ifyouhigh is a family classic.
Ann: Ugh, yes. And we will ask after this week's episode, we'll post this and ask you all to share some accounts that you love that are not built around one human being's presumed lifestyle but that are bringing something else and something non-FOMO inducing into your life.
Aminatou: Thanks for coming to our TED talk. See you on the Internet. [Laughs]
Ann: See you on the Internet.
Aminatou: You can find us many places on the Internet, on our website callyourgirlfriend.com, you can download the show anywhere you listen to your favs, or on Apple Podcasts where we would love it if you left us a review. You can email us at callyrgf@gmail.com. We're on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook at @callyrgf. You can even leave us a short and sweet voicemail at 714-681-2943. That's 714-681-CYGF. Our theme song is by Robyn, original music is composed by Carolyn Pennypacker Riggs, our logos are by Kenesha Sneed, our associate producer is Destry Maria Sibley. This podcast is produced by Gina Delvac.