Instagram – a life in vignette?

Social media can enhance human interaction, it can inform, connect, communicate to a degree previously unimaginable. It can also amplify the most shallow depths and allude to meaning where there is none. It can delude and degrade the experience of life, so we must always ask ourselves the question: what is a thing for? What good is it? What harm can it do?

Our real lives are incidental to our dreams. My dreams are a vignette of my aspirations; my romantic inclinations and my work as a writer. My real life, beyond the vignette, is more the realm of cold water, hairy bath-plugs, washing up, and shirts that need ironing.

But isolated counter-images are highly emotive. They interrupt the mundane, they resonate, hold back the blink reflex for a moment while we freeze-frame and take note – a pattern, a combination of colours, or contrast, a shape,… these things are mysterious. We want to capture them, to preserve them in a jar and Instagram is that jar.

But given the means of recording those freeze frames, of presenting them, this does not prevent us from dishonesty by omission. We self edit, and thereby create an idealised life stream in order to impress the imaginary “other” with how cool, how stylish that life is, entirely void of the mundane. It is a fiction.

Today, I’ve spent the day in Freudian mode, analysing the dream sequences of others on Instagram and have discovered human frailty and human insecurity as evidenced by the force of its denial, by its over-compensatory claims to the contrary. I am in good company then. But there is also beauty here, beauty in the visual fictions we create.

Sitting in a cafe at the weekend my eye was drawn to the colours and shapes of a vinegar bottle, some sachets of sugar, a salt and pepper pot. Ignore the surroundings – the smeared egg on the plate, the spilled coffee grains, the squished potato on the tile floor – these things are not attractive, so we exclude them. We draw a frame around them, as around our lives, simplify the shapes, play with the composition, look for the golden ratios,.. out comes the Droid and,… snap.

Instagram provides a platform for such vignettes, also a set of filters and basic manipulation tools that seem designed to accentuate the romanticism of an image, but which real life has a way of filtering out. I don’t know by what magic this is achieved. I have spent many a fruitless hour on Paintshop trying to sprinkle this same effect over my photography, while Instagram achieves it with a few buttons and sliders.

But as with all social media there is the danger of valuing one’s life by the number of likes or followers – translate as “audience”. This is my life, as evidenced by this bottle of vinegar, and it must be worth it because I have a massive audience, thus my every freeze-frame is capable of reaching and influencing the lives of many others. We aspire to become actors in our own soap opera, our own willing Truman, gullible sacrifices to a global audience of voyeurs.  We must be vigilant then, and remember life is not art, that the person is not the portrait, or we risk tumbling into the delusional void of crass superficiality.

We all know life is lived entirely out of shot, yet subliminal feeds like Instagrams are interesting, especially when we focus on the whole, rather than upon its parts. Instagram is about the blink of the eye, it is about those moments when we have not brought our camera with us, when all we have is our ‘phone. And with it there is the potential to capture the most intimate, the most fleeting of moments, to collect them, to create a visual journal of our life’s journey. In the early days ‘phones came with poor cameras, but this is no longer the case.

So, I’ve spent the day with Instagram, populating a tentative mosaic of image-ined life. Shapes, colours, emotions, mystery, joy, longing, passion. The images in my stream do mean something to me, they do attempt to convey something, an aspiration perhaps to vignette the bits of life I value, but mostly I think to try to convey the beauty I find in the ordinary. Yes, an emotive sunset over sea or mountains will stir the heart, and most I think would agree such a thing is beautiful, but we can find beauty in the simple things too, in the every day.

Actually I’m no longer sure about that vinegar bottle. I think it looks ridiculous actually – whatever was I thinking? I may just edit that out, tidy up the romanticised notion of my life. Instagram is very good at that.

Of course it’s also good at shoving in your face the life-streams of today’s chosen celebrities, and one must therefore ask the question by means of what algorithm does Ronaldo out trump Zendaya, and who the hell are these people anyway, and how far would I have to scroll down to find the equally fictitious life-stream of Michael Graeme?