Instagram has never been my favorite app, perhaps because I love reading words more than staring at photos. But beyond that core element, it s continued to be the bane of my existence — at least while writing about the tech industry, chatting with friends, and watching the world around me strain to be more "Instagrammable."
I understand some people — maybe a decent amount of Instagram s 500 million daily users — are inspired by the photos they see in their feeds. For my colleague Miriam Kramer, her highly curated Instagram account is a much-preferred distraction to the Facebook app. For one of my best friends Lizza Monet Morales, Instagram is part of her career as an actress, TV host, and social media personality.
For me, Instagram is a place of fakeness, humblebrags, and harassment, and I don t want to be a part of it anymore. That s why when I got an iPhone X for Christmas and started fresh by not restoring from backup, I didn t bother downloading Instagram.
For some, Instagram is a creative outlet, a place where they find happiness spending hours searching for "Instagrammable" moments, taking the perfect shot, choosing the right filter, thinking up a caption with the appropriate hashtags, and waiting to post at the exact right moment. And then, sometimes they delete it if they don t get enough "likes," and okay, that s their choice. For others, Instagram is just a mindless and relaxing way to start or end their day or to take a break.
For me, it s a place where I ve showed off some happy moments of my life, and I don t really know why. I mean they re nice memories. It s like a scrapbook, but why does my scrapbook need to be public? Why does each picture in my scrapbook need a number of likes and the potential for comments?
Let s take a brief look at my Instagram: 1) Margaritas 2) White House press briefing room 3) Puppy at startup event [and evidence of me wearing the same dress too close together] 4) Me on the beach with an ex 5) A video of Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook s F8 conference 6) Badge from F8
