Capturing Moments
Is social media the only reason we take photos?
A couple of years ago, I decided to take a break from social media because it was taxing and to some extent, depressing, to go on platforms like Instagram and find how successful and happy people seemed. Influencer and AI slop were starting to show its true colors. It was a red flag: being on social media could distort your expectations of your own life. You could deviate from your own goals and hobbies quite easily.
After that, I joined Instagram one more time just to see if I could clear out all the noise and make the algorithm work for my benefit. Things didn’t work out the second time either which has now led me to stop using Instagram indefinitely. I still exist on platforms such as Twitter and Bluesky, but that’s because content filtering in these spaces is easier for me and I can build a close-knit community relatively easily.
A big reason why Instagram is so successful among the masses is its visual content appeal. People used to take photos for Instagram, but now they do the same with videos. The rationale remains the same: you post something on the platform not for you to keep but for others to see and hopefully appreciate; the two sides of the coin being that either you will be massively popular, or massively frustrated. Before I left the platform, I had been surprised to see that the people within my circle were also investing time in making short-form video content. This is all alongside their full-time job and family responsibilities. Every overseas trip was a story told across multiple reels. Multiple doses of envy, propagated through social media.
Of course, one might argue that you could choose not to be envious. But I have observed this with basic human emotions, that controlling them is much harder than experiencing them. Feelings are involuntary actions, with the exception that you can be more aware about them and learn not to give in. Choosing not to feel comes after years of effort. The process is like sharpening a blunt knife: it’s never perfect, and you need to redo it several times in the knife’s lifetime.
Since short form video content has a higher potential for virality now, I see fewer and fewer photos across other social media platforms too. Twitter and Bluesky have a higher text appeal: if you write well, you may or may not succeed, but if you are constantly witty and know how to write clickbaity content, you’ll do well. Surprisingly, visual content in the form of photos only needs to be exceptional, which is another way of saying that you need to have the skill but also the best tools to take photos. Ordinary photos, the way they were initially popular on Instagram, have no easy way of being found, which means that there is a good chance that they might cease to exist online pretty soon.
The absence of simplicity and innocence in the photos we like to post online indicates that we might no longer click photos because we want them to stay as a memory with us. Physical photos and photo albums are not something that my friends would show to me first when I visit them at their home. If photos have less visibility on social media in general, no matter how good they are, it could reflect on our society in the form of the ideology that we don’t want to take photos at all. As the bar for content quality keeps getting raised, such hobbies keep going lower and lower in priority.
A couple of weeks ago, while scrolling through my phone’s gallery, I realized that while the skies were beautiful, the traffic on the roads was at an absolute low, and there was enough time to stop and look at the humdrum of the city, I hadn’t captured any of it. I used to get a feeling of satisfaction when I used to capture moments which didn’t make sense to anyone but me. I lack the hunger for such moments, but deep down I know that I am not satisfied, because the only world I see in my phone’s gallery is now mostly within four walls.
I think that moving forward, when I step out of my house, I will try not to think about which photo looks visually better to the world, and think more about which image would remind me of something from the past when I look at it later.