Instagram Deprivation: How is that going?

It’s been a surprisingly quiet couple of weeks since I left Instagram, but it’s a different kind of quietness that I hear. It’s the fact that I don’t have to turn my head towards my phone like I’m a conditioned animal all the time. It’s this new space in my brain that I feel and hear…

Just the title sounds a bit like I’m keeping something essential from myself; you hear “sleep deprivation” but not Instagram deprivation, right? How essential can this be in our everyday life to call it that? Well, let me tell you a bit more.

A bit of background

During the summer and because of corona, I’ve indulged myself in spending copious hours on my phone shifting from one app to the other because I didn’t have much to do than catching up with friends, read a book, or two, etc. It’s a very sensible thing to do. Nonetheless, as the semester started I had my tutees, my internship, my courses, and thesis work: I had to prioritize! so I did.

I remember seeing that I was spending a weekly average of 6 hours and 40 minutes on my phone and most of them were dedicated to social media (WhatsApp and Instagram), which is a number I expected to see decreasing significantly as now my hands were quite tight. Nonetheless, the numbers only decreased by 40 minutes or so. I was still giving 6 hours of my week to Instagram.

It was the third week of September when I realized I had given 18 hours of my time to a platform that was not giving me much in return. Entertainment? Sure, but what else is beyond that?

Why I left Instagram

“If you’re not paying for the product, then most likely you are the product”

The above is a comment by one of the main narrators of the documentary “The Social Dilemma”, and it’s painfully adequate. While we oftentimes believe ourselves to be the consumers of a product, we haven’t all realized that certain products are more like subjects than objects: they consume us, they measure us, and they predict our behavior, what kind of object does that?

By the same token, they offer the contrast of an object being an instrument versus being a subject in another way. Picture a bicycle, they say. On its own, it serves one purpose: you get on it, you ride it and leave it somewhere and wherever you leave it, it remains silent. It doesn’t demand anything from you. Now, ask yourself, doesn’t your phone demand, yell, supplicates for your attention? Isn’t it alive to a big extent?

“Hey! this new app you downloaded would like to send you notifications”
Sounds familiar? It’s at least the 3rd thing most of us accept to.   

With all this in my head, partly inspired by the documentary on “The Social Dilemma” on Netflix, and partly concerned with my own freedom from a platform, I left this platform. Now let’s see about what I’ve learned.

The lessons of Instagram –free dynamics

I found myself in Nuuksio after a hike with my tutees musing, “sometimes, when you’re looking for ideals, you’ll lose yourself in the process.” Later that day I found out that’s what I’ve been doing on Instagram all along. I’ve been looking for the perfect body (which makes me feel bad about my own), the perfect voice (which makes me think I’m not masculine enough), the ideal relationship (which no one truly has), etc…

I’ve lost myself looking for it in the void of superficiality that Instagram truly is. With filters now, we have the very tools to cosmeticize life into something that is not and cannot be. We are, thus, injecting superficiality and expectations into our everyday dynamics, and then we wonder why we are so bored with our own lives. Lives aren’t any more perfect than ours, they are just presented in those ways and we’re chasing those ideals.

The second lesson I learned is that those who want to talk to you will find their ways to do so. As an international person, I have various people whose contact I only keep through other platforms. For some reason, WhatsApp feels more personal. Understandably, that remained a valid reason for me to keep Instagram open.

I left my number to my contacts on Instagram, and those who have wanted have texted me and continued to talk to me on a less demanding medium (WhatsApp). By doing this, I have eliminated the desultory idea of having an audience, which I don’t need. I want real friends, that’s all.

The last thing I’ve experienced is the silence I talked about in the beginning. It’s mental silence. For a couple of weeks now, I have been thinking more locally, and while it is difficult to explain, I feel like my mind is “freer” like there is more space to move around and connect one idea to the other now that the fail videos, cute-cat videos, and memes, and gifs, etc., aren’t around.

I like that I can go to enjoy nature, and slowly I’m losing the need to pull out my phone and upload an Instagram story. Now, I can take a picture of something I like and just keep it to myself in my phone gallery. That simplifies life, and perhaps that’s what we need: a more simplified, local and down-to-earth perspective of life.

My dilemmas and many’s 

Over these days, I’ve talked to other people about my little experiment, and they’ve told me how hard it is to leave a platform that offers so much as Instagram, something I fully agree with. After all, Instagram is able to connect you to the rest of the world, and it is capable of boosting your business. Many have to work with platforms as part of their jobs because these platforms are a great means of propagating information.

Personally, I love the gallery idea of Instagram. That’s how it started I guess. I like that it can capture good moments of my life and keep a short description, etc. It’s a digital photo album. Given this, I know I will revisit Instagram every now and then to keep that gallery going, but I’ve promised myself I will not let it entice me into becoming its object.

While these reasons are all valid and I’m not here to ascribe myself a holier aura than others around me, it’s vital to keep in mind that these platforms should serve us, that we shouldn’t be their product, and that we can use them to unite us instead of dividing us (the latter topic I’ll explore in the following issue).

And you? Are you up for a challenge?

Join me in my “Instagram deprivation.” You’ll find yourself looking for the application on your phone absolutely unconsciously; you’ll feel bored at many times (and that’s great because creativity occurs then); you’ll feel disconnected in a puzzlingly good and bad way. But above anything else; you’ll be walking towards gaining a literacy we haven’t been taught by our parents and that we have to teach ourselves: we’ll learn digital literacy; we’ll learn to limit our interaction with these new subjects that we’ve brought to life in this century.

Photo by Huifang Wen