Over the past few days, I’ve read several witty and contemplative essays and posts about the Instagram changes (including this essay my friend Leslie published yesterday), lamenting the death of the old gram, voicing valid frustration for a winsome space turned loud and foreign and busy.
Like so many of you, I’ve also been thinking about the impossibility of keeping up with constant algorithm and platform changes. To this day, I’ve still never downloaded or used Snapchat or TikTok. Instagram has long been my respite—sometimes used a bit too much (I confess), but the digital space provided community and connections for my husband and I with three cross-state moves over the past seven years. And as we prepare for another move to a TBD location at a TBD-yet-looming future date, I still hope to connect and discover new friends via Instagram. Instagram is honestly the only reason I have friends (and a job) in Denver today (this is not an exaggeration). And yet, I’ve seen the danger. Any one thing that can reach the masses has the ability to propagandize and disseminate incorrect and even harmful information.
We moved to Denver months before lockdown started. But once Denver officially shut down and our streets were vacant and favorite coffee shops and taquerias temporarily closed, I found myself on social media almost constantly. Loneliness drove me there, boredom kept me, conspiracy theories haunted me. Up until March 2020, I’d never heard tell of Qanon, but the theory of a Satanic elitist cult of powerful world leaders, politicians, and celebrities who feed upon the blood of children took off like a, well, pandemic... All of a sudden, miscellaneous women I’d been following for their healthy recipe hacks and ship lapped homes were posting prettified carousel graphics about sacrificial rituals and celebrity arrests. The hashtag #saveourchildren began trending and there were echoes of the end times and black outs.
I didn’t really believe it. And thank god, I never participated in the *fake news* dissemination. But I was affected by the what ifs, the fear of uncertainty, the extreme loneliness of isolation. Instagram was responsible, as was Twitter and even Facebook. I received at least a few Facebook messages from real life acquaintances warning of terrifying possibilities and the mark-of-the-beast jab. Rabbit Hole, a New York Times podcast, investigated the severe effect of streaming services like YouTube on the psyche. One man they interview was a die-hard democrat who, over time, became sucked into the world of conspiracy theories and alleged government coverups over months and months of exposure to suggested YouTube videos that gradually grew in absurdity and danger. This is when social media is better off dead. Our finite brains cannot handle the cacophony of voices with Chicken Little messages of falling skies and anti-christs and cataclysmic events and such oppressive, overwhelming evil.
At some point, social media began cracking down on the conspiracy-spreading. I know there are plenty of voices who think we should be able to say whatever we want (looking at you, Elon Musk). But words have consequences, especially viral ones. The acceptance of some of these beliefs influenced too many to refuse masks and vaccines. It drove the masses to unapologetic Trump support and allegiance, culminating on January 6th in the attack on the nation’s Capitol. We’ve all seen how vitriolic and hateful nice-assuming people can be when they get behind the anonymity of a computer screen. Most of us are aware that outrage and harsh words breed views and increase ratings. And now we all know how those words perpetuated by millions, repeated, and reshared, and rehashed, and reheard over and over and over can result in violence, chaos, even death.
So Instagram…it’s not only respite. It can also be poison where fake news festers and bitterness finds company in like-minded angst and hate and supremacy. I don’t think the switch to more video and reels will make things better as far as cracking down on false information. It’s far easier to hook viewers with a short video than a 10-graphic carousel post.
AND YET goodness grows in the cracks of a messy digital world. In chaos and uncertainty, we need beauty more than ever (as Leslie reminded us in her essay ‘The Death of Instagram’). “The world will be saved by beauty,” said Dostoevsky, including (I think) the digital world, the space where lies easily spread and conspiracy theories gain footholds. We fight the fakeness with the genuine goodness of art crafted in the dark. We hold up our candles of truth and demand the darkness of lies and hot takes and rabble rousing flees. YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE, no lasting power anyway. Our good work will be more difficult to complete than ever before because we are competing with a multitude of shallow and false voices. But they have no ultimate power.
Integrity is the fertilizer of the words we sow, the art we create, the good work we toil and labor over.
The Way Forward Is Back
Some of my favorite writers were writing long before Instagram was even the seed of an idea. They lived in a pre-digital age where affirmations and rejections were delayed via old fashioned snail mail. There’s something endearing and romantic about Madeleine L’Engle’s upstate New York writing nook and Annie Dillard’s gloomy, Pacific coast writer’s cabin. As I’m writing this, I’m currently sitting at a gluten free city coffee shop surrounded by dozens of people typing away on laptops and iPads and talking on iPhones while a gruffy barista punches orders into a an Apple Square system. None of us are having to wait long for much (except for the military orders my husband and I have been waiting two months for but I digress…)
Our modern digital landscape offers the gratification of instant feedback. We no longer know how to sit in silence, how to write for the smallest audience (the empty seats as Charlie Daniels writes). We can post something in a second and receive at least a few likes. Social media provides the possibility to be catapulted from obscurity to instant success and influencer status with just one post or one story or one video. We can go from 12 followers to 10,000 in a day, we can receive invitations to appear on Jimmy Fallon or hang out with Lance Bass because we know HOW TO ENGAGE AN AUDIENCE. But what have we sacrificed along the way? In the push for engagement did we stoke anger and share posts we knew would generate reactions? Were we complicit in the spread of fake news?Could we be comfortable in a cold fisherman’s cabin with nothing but a deadline and a typewriter? **these are just thoughts and not directed at all at any influencer or any particular person. If anything, I’m preaching to the choir.**
I know it’s bleak. Any writer hoping for a book contract must wrestle with the messy business of growing a platform or potentially being rejected because our existing audience is just too damn small. So I say this gently, making space for the valid frustrations, the grief of a sometimes-good-thing being commodified for more clicks, more time, more profit. We’ve seen platforms abused. We’ve seen social media personalities rise to fame overnight. We’ve felt the pang of few affirmations, the silence of words put out to more empty than filled seats.
But if I can offer you this, as one obscure writer to another, know your work has value if it is crafted in integrity. And even if only one person reads those words you toiled over, do not despise the smallness of your audience. That one person is still a person, that one soul may be changed for the better because of the words you wrote and shared in the dark. Don’t give up on it even if Instagram is giving up on you. Your voice is too important. We need the beauty you bring to the world, the beauty that will save the world.
Art Crafted in the Dark
Your words are an encouragement and balm for this fellow obscure writer. That last paragraph, especially. Thank you!
"Do not despise the smallness of your audience." Ugh, yes. As someone who has always clung to that obscure verse, "Do not despise the day of small things," that God whispered over a prophet, this just fits. I turned my downtime back on again today, after several weeks off. Here's to trusting, integrity, and intentionality--even when none of them get applauded, they are still worth it. Thank you for joining the other beautiful voices speaking into this, Sarah. We need all we can get.