On social media

For the past few pandemic years, I’ve been retracting from social media. Part of it was shame from being an “influencer” in the past, seeking out likes and followers to feel better about myself. It made me feel like I wasn’t actually being social, but just contributing some numbers to Instagram’s DAU statistics.

Part of it was also the fear that I wasn’t actually friends with anybody I was “friends” with online. I wanted to see who would still be around if I wasn’t broadcasting my life like a movie, in “stories” and “reels”.

Turns out, not a lot of people. And really only the ones who aren’t public on Instagram in the first place.

While I still can’t really get back up to speed and post about my life all the time like I used to, I am finding comfort in maintaining a super small, private account. I’m treating it like I used to treat Facebook when it first came out for high school students in 2005.

In 2005, only students that were verified as part of your high school network could see your profile. Or friends that you added directly. So I posted pretty much whatever I wanted. These were the days when you transferred your entire camera roll from your point and shoot digital camera, and uploaded literally every single photo to Facebook and started tagging your friends, no matter how ugly you all looked in the mistake shots.

If no one could see our Facebook but people we literally see every day at school, what’s the point of transferring files to friends the old way? The old way was literally burning a data CD or bringing your camera to your friend’s computer, installing the software, transferring it that way. It was also a way of looking “cool”, I think, by posting pictures of you and your friends at college parties, playing beer pong, showing people that you had a social life. Maybe to signal to people, “Hey, I go to parties and concerts! Invite me!” and then people would start inviting me to their events for their parties. Facebook was a big part of socializing back then.

As Facebook opened up over the years, they encouraged people to keep posting as if they were sharing with the same small network. But profiles became publicly accessible. And consumer behaviors became mapped to social interactions. And Facebook bought Instagram.

I don’t really know what I’m talking about here—except to say that we’re not in that same world, we haven’t been for a long time. But we can still try to carve out little pieces of the web that are private and intimate.