The Blueprint
Everyone has a few defining moments in their life that they can look back on and pick out as having a real impact on who they grew up to be. Embarrassingly enough for me, this included the night that I downloaded Instagram. I had managed to put off the whole social media thing later than most people that I knew. I had no desire to know what the guy who sat next to me in my eighth grade math class was doing after school on a Tuesday night. But as kids do, due to a paralyzing fear of being left behind, I finally downloaded it.
It seems fitting that my last moments before diving into the strange virtual reality of social media occurred while I was at a cottage. Sometime during the summer of my eighth grade year, my world grew from a number of people that I could count on my own two hands to a community of more faces than I knew existed. I remember being entirely absorbed in the foreignness of likes and comments on my glowing phone screen. Never before had my world seemed so big. As young teenagers often do, I felt like I was involved in something incredible and earth shattering. I was partially right.
As a naive and starry-eyed thirteen year old kid, those early days of social media were great. I welcomed any and all tips on how to use Instagram like everyone else. I wanted my profile to blend into the sea of identically posed and filtered photos with a long string of comments and a number of likes. My friends dutifully explained what and when to post, whose photos to like and what was acceptable to comment. How to avoid being too much, and just enough. As kids navigating this new digital world, we accidentally began to draft a list of rules that defined what being “cool” looked like in this new space. Like a form of digital literacy that we were both learning and creating all at once. We designed the metaphorical blueprint for social media that still structures the way we use these apps. It’s a bizarre concept— one that is difficult to explain to someone who didn’t grow up on social media and all too familiar to someone that did.
The Silicon Valley CEOs— the ones that created Facebook and Instagram and later Snapchat and Twitter, had a design plan that somehow worked better than they ever could have imagined and at the same time worse than most people have even begun to realize. They took our teenage awkwardness and offered to replace it with something that was clean and polished. In theory, they took real life and made it better. Shinier. Photos could be posed, filtered and cropped so that if we tried hard enough we could pretend that real life was as put together as it looked on our Instagram feeds.
This formula worked, because awkwardness scares people. Messiness does too. Which is interesting, because these things are often what makes life feel real and interesting. First date conversations and mismatched outfits for morning classes are some of the key ingredients in what it means to be human. But these things are also easily hidden, made pretty and cleaned up neatly into Instagram profiles, accompanied by carefully typed out captions. Awkward turned into precisely edited pictures and planned out Instagram feeds that make it too easy to forget what real life looks like. It is unsurprising that a large portion of the population would prefer to live within the safety of their social media bubble than to risk the unpredictability that accompanies living in the real world.
Growing up on social media allowed us to be the architects of our own fate. We accidentally crafted our own social media addictions before this concept was fathomable. Sometimes I think it’s funny that one of the most instrumental tools of our generation was co-designed by a generation of awkward thirteen year old kids. But mostly, it freaks me out. During the most foundational and transformative periods in our lives, we became guinea pigs in the most bizarre and successful social experiment of the modern world.
Social media allows us to connect easily, and efficiently. It's the selling point. By clicking a follow button, commenting on a stranger's post or swiping on a boy on Tinder, we could hypothetically have a new relationship. It reduces life to minimal effort on-screen gestures that attempt to mimic the real thing but don’t quite get it right. This is part of social media’s paradoxical nature. Apps like Instagram have a strange way of isolating us from each other while providing the illusion that we are more connected than ever before.
It’s like we’re suspended between two realities: the one that we’re actually living in, and the one within our phone screens. As long as there's an option to scroll through a never-ending stream of updates, we will be plagued by an insatiable fear of missing out and will never be able to fully commit to either reality. We’re torn between these two worlds that are meant to work in harmony but don’t, and can’t. Because it is impossible to find middle ground between real life and its glossy alter-ego.
Sometimes the blurred line between our society and the technology in our hands uncomfortably reminds me of a Black Mirror episode. The back pocket of almost all my jeans are permanently imprinted with the outline of my phone case. Some are even starting to rip in the corners; an unintended consequence of keeping my device on me at all times. I remember one of my professors joking that every day our world inches closer to the narrative of an early 2000s sci-fi movie where technology takes over the same people who created it. Something along the lines of George Orwell’s 1984, or the early 2001: A Space Odyssey, which describes a dramatic human versus machine uprising. He laughed when he said it, but part of me wonders if perhaps we’ve been waiting for the wrong thing all along. Maybe while we were preparing for our smartphones to somehow rise up against us like robots in one of those familiar movies (which honestly would have been cooler), this war with technology had already happened in a quieter and more subtle way. Because I don’t remember the last time I left my house without my phone and I miss the days when my jeans were not stamped with the ghost of my phone case.
I think that in some distant future, we’ll look back on this version of social media and shake our heads to the tune of what were we thinking? Because slowly, the same generation of kids who drafted the dos and don’ts of the social media world are getting tired of this standard of perfection that dominates their Instagram feeds. We’re craving a sense of authenticity, which is appearing quietly in the form of Instagram photo dumps and disposable cameras. In small ways, our generation is rebelling against the same flawed blueprint that we created in the first place. I’m bored of the carefully drafted responses and unsaid rules of what to say and what not to say on Instagram and Snapchat and Facebook. In my opinion, I think that it’s time to draft a new rulebook. One that celebrates realness and messy connection and being too much. One that is more along the lines of: how to be a human being in the digital age, because sometimes this is too easy to forget. Rule #1: screw the blueprint. ◆