teawithantigone: I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why I use this app recently. Instagram
teawithantigone: I’ve been thinking a lot about how and why I use this app recently. Instagram has been such a fun platform to share and connect with fellow students and bookworms, but the upcoming changes unsettled me a bit. As much creativity and connection as Instagram has brought into my life, there are a lot of challenges and downsides that come with social media that I feel I need to weigh up. Instagram’s design and purpose is ultimately geared to getting the majority of us consuming more, rather than creating more. This makes sense because that’s social media’s whole thing, right? If it capitalises on our attention and there is no limit on its growth (in fact, if the economic system it operates within demands that it KEEPS growing), then it makes perfect sense that it will unscrupulously devour our time and that, no matter how much of our attention we offer it, it will always want more and won’t ever be satiated. I don’t want to sound like a harbinger of techno doom (that’s a lie, I do a little bit), I just get so annoyed with constantly having to fight a platform that has the potential to bring so much creative joy and fizzling life into a world sitting with so much pain and grief, especially now. We set time limits, set intentions, tell ourselves social media is just a tool and what matters is how we wield it… But then there’s an update and we have to start all over again. A paltry reminder that you’ve spent x amount of time on Instagram doesn’t stand a chance against the whole app being designed to take up as much of your time as it can. I don’t think that means we can’t use it for inspiration and for sharing the things we create with those who want to see it—it just means it’s going to be a LOT harder to do so intentionally because the app is not geared to facilitate that anymore (it hasn’t been for a long time, if ever). I got this book on slow living for my mom and paging through it with her turned out to be just the antidote for my social-media-wired brain. Books in general seem to have a positive effect, actually. What are your thoughts on this? Are you also feeling a bit unenthused with Instagram as of late?https://www.instagram.com/p/CRWsCDRL6NK/?utm_medium=tumblr -- source link
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