Imitation is the sincerest form of…
I’m one of those people whose reaction to the pandemic shock was not to frantically scroll through social media feeds and news websites but quite the opposite — to abandon them. Admittedly, at that time I didn’t think that lockdown was going to last longer than 3, maximum 6 weeks, otherwise I might have not let go of my connection with the outside world so easily. A few days ago, I got tempted by Instagram, and I went back to the familiar scroll for a few minutes. After the initial frenzy of liking and commenting and saving for later, the renewed novelty wore off and I started looking at the screen with a much more critical gaze. And then, as it happens, Deleuze came to my mind. From a fairly innocent photo-sharing platform, Instagram turned into a new mechanism of control society — but a much more insidious one.
Control societies are based on the idea of illusionary freedom that people are awarded, but in fact all choices and their outcomes are increasingly controlled. To quote Crary, “as disciplinary norms (…) lost their effectiveness, television was crafted into a machinery of regulation, introducing previously unknown effects of subjection and supervision. This is why television is a crucial and adaptable part of a relatively long transition (…), lasting several decades, between a world of older disciplinary institutions and one of 24/7 control”. In other words, TV took on the role of controlling by putting bums on sofas and giving them an illusion of the freedom of choice among countless channels to entertain them, while at the same time it made sure that people stayed home most evenings and were served tightly regulated and filtered content. No doubt, it was a highly consequential way of controlling consumption.
But something else is happening on Instagram, as I scroll and see similar photos one after another. Faces look nearly identical, houses appear weirdly alike, and all beauty spots merge into one. It turns out someone else noticed this too.
Following my curiosity, I discovered articles instructing future influencers how to properly take photos of their hands, and incredibly honest tell-all stories of insta-photos behind the scenes. Of course, the reasons why users produce photos and posts that are suspiciously similar are clear: they discovered what Instagram audiences and algorithms value and engineered every bit of it. You get more likes for a photo with certain tags, objects, or composition, and then of course the more repetition, the more likeable a certain format becomes.
“Artists and creators fall into patterns. But I think that what is happening on Instagram is more extreme.” She seems to enjoy the irony behind these aesthetic pictures, often tagged with trendy slogans about ‘authenticity’ and ‘creative living,’ when contrasted with almost identical photos of other people claiming much the same things. It turns out that while many people may believe that they are pretty special, they are, knowingly or not, following a generic formula that has been laid out and done countless times before. (Source)
Instagram gives its users the illusion that they’re free to express their own creativity, while in fact it controls by shaping this creativity. You can be as expressive as you like, as long as it’s a square photo with a smiling face centred in the middle with a pastel-coloured background and bright lighting. Your creativity has no limits, as long as you tag it with appropriate keywords and stick to tried and tested patterns. From controlling consumption, societies of control went a step further: they started controlling production. In the meantime, you believe that all this technology empowers you to unleash your creative potential.
