In 2010, Instagram made its debut in Apple’s App Store. Since then, it has amassed over a billion users and is worth an estimated $102 billion. Its success, in many respects, reflects a sea change in the social mores of generations gone by where privacy and humility were highly prized. However, at the same time, the ascension of Instagram squares perfectly with one of the most ineluctable facets of the human condition: that being our desire for human connection. In a word, the end of Instagram and many of the social media platforms that now dominate our cultural landscape is simple intimacy. The desire to be truly known and seen is what keeps the fat cats of Silicon Valley in their skinny jeans and triple mocha frappe extremes. And yet, the promise of intimacy they implicitly preach is a promise they cannot keep because what they are offering is a caricature trapped within the confines of a screen. That is not intimacy. It will never be intimacy. In this paper, I will explore the ways in which Instagram tries, and ultimately fails, to facilitate interpersonal intimacy while also exploring the ways users’ participation on the platform has evolved and adapted in reaction to its inherent relational shortcoming. 

In a 2017 Startups.com interview, Instagram co-founder Kevin Systrom, speaking about the app’s origins, said, “Instagram’s core was communication, and photos were part of it, but not necessarily the focus. Over time, what you do is you simply take in data about what your users are doing, and you focus on the stuff that people love the most.” From this, we can gather that, according to Systrom and his no-doubt significant bundle of data, communication is what people “love the most.” This holds with lived experience. Communication and connection are pillars of human flourishing without which we wither and waste away. In the words of Maya Angelou, “Alone, all alone/ Nobody, but nobody/ Can make it out here alone.” 

In acknowledgment of this, Instagram has built itself to be as communication-friendly as a photo-sharing platform can be, offering users the ability to like, comment on, and share pictures on top of introducing a private messaging feature. However, despite their best efforts, Instagram is fundamentally inhibited from facilitating true connectedness. After all, while a picture may be worth a thousand words and likes, comments, shares, and messages may aid in affirming someone’s sense of worth and work, a screen is a poor replacement for a real live human being. Thus, by its very nature, Instagram introduces at least one degree of distance to human connection that cannot be truly be overcome by any of the liking, commenting, sharing, or messaging features mentioned above. 

Here, it is worth turning to twentieth century social critic and marxist philosopher Guy Debord whose 1967 work contains a stunning prescient description of this exact situation. In Society of The Spectacle, Debord argues that we live in a society dominated by imagery and innured to specularity. We exist and persist in a spectacle that he claims “…is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” Frankly, one would be hard-pressed to come up with a more accurate description of Instagram. However, Debord goes further, writing, “The spectacle is nothing more than the common language of separation… The spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites them as separate.” This claim obtains. 

At the present moment, we have never been more connected, but never have we been more separate. Loneliness in the west has been climbing for years to the point that in 2018, the United Kingdom appointed a real, live Minister for Loneliness. Although, oddly enough, they only appointed one. Regardless, the spectacularity of modern technology has put our lives before the eyes of whosoever choses to look, but in Debord’s own words, “What binds the spectators together is no more than an irreversible relation at the very center which maintains their isolation.” We are alone. All… alone. Held captive by the irreversible, central, and worthwhile desire to be seen and known yet unwilling to admit that perhaps that desire won’t be met staring into an iPhone. 

Put simply, Instagram has not met and cannot meet our desire for deep human connection. Its form precludes that function. Now, in all fairness to Instagram, this problem of inherent separation is not unique to them. The same issue of connected isolation plagues almost all social-media platforms. However, Instagram’s emphasis on the curation and projection of images presents an added challenge to the human desire for connection for the simple fact that it highlights and glorifies human interaction at its most superficial. 

It can well be said that the ethos of Instagram is “let us make man into an image,” and a carrying capacity of users have taken this in stride. Having realized that there is no real intimacy to be had through an electronic screen, most of the app’s users have instead settled on lesser forms of connection. In place of being seen and known, it is enough to be seen alone. To that end, it is not the quality, but the quantity of “connection” that matters. 

In the aforementioned interview, Systrom admitted as much, differentiating Instagram from Facebook, saying, 

“When I say, ‘Social network,’ I think it’s a different type of social network. On Instagram, you can have multiple identities. You can have an anonymous identity. On Facebook, it’s like, ‘This is me, and this is me once.’ It’s a very different connection. They’re a symmetrical relationship. You have friends on Facebook, and on Instagram, it’s like, ‘I can follow you, but you don’t have to follow me back if you don’t like my cappuccino pictures.’”

The combination of Instagram’s focus on images alongside the inherent asymmetry of the platform’s follower/following design has created a landscape where the principal focus of the app’s participants is how to create photos and content that garner the most followers and likes. And to that question, the answer is as old as time.

It is a well recorded fact that sex is uniquely adept at garnering attention. However, for a carrying capacity of western history, the potent appeal of sexuality was undercut by social mores that put sex safely away as something considered private, even sacred. Sexual desire was something to be wrangled, tamed. 

That’s changed.

In recent decades, the tension between sexuality and traditional morality has seismically waned, and sex is now increasingly on display. Nowhere is that more apparent than on a platform dominated by and reliant on imagery. 

In 2018, Forbes.com ran an article titled “Despite No Nudity Rule, Instagram Is Chock Full of Pornography.” It is. Simply searching “sexy” will garner more than 80 million hits, and adult film stars regularly use the platform to shore up their businesses. Truly, the accessibility of sexually explicit content on a platform which purports to be family-friendly boggles the mind.

Anecdotally, I was in an Uber on November 10, 2019, talking about Christianity with my driver Timothy, and we struck upon the prevelence of temptation and sex in the modern age. He turned around to face me and very seriously said, referencing Instagram, “I’ve tried to stay away because you can’t escape it. A**. Ti**ies. They’re everywhere.” 

In fairness to Instagram, depending on the curation of an individual’s feed, it is possible for someone to open the app and not be assailed by bared body parts or people dancing or posing provocatively. However, when one drifts to the “Search and Explore” page, that assurance evaporates almost immediately.

According to Instagram’s Help Center, “On Search & Explore, you can find photos and videos that you might like from accounts you don’t yet follow. You may also see curated topics we think the Instagram community will enjoy” (Instagram Help Center). Based on the follower counts of some of Instagram’s most popular accounts, those topics are sex and celebrity with some combination of the two cornering the platform. As to why this might be, British film theorist Laura Mulvey offers a compelling explanation in her exploration of film spectatorship that centers on two things: objectification and identification.  

According to Mulvey, there are 

“…two contradictory aspects of the pleasurable structures of looking in the conventional cinematic situation. The first, scopophilic, arises from pleasure in using another person as an object of sexual stimulation through sight. The second, developed through narcissism and the constitution of the ego, comes from identification with the image seen.”

Applying Mulvey’s paradigm of objectification and identification to the success of sex and celebrity on Instagram highlights a well-known truth: the millions of people that follow stars like the titanic Kardashian clan either want to sleep with them or be one of them. 

In this respect, Mulvey’s work explains the popularity of certain users on Instagram; however, a point of divergence emerges when one examines her arguments on the influence of the “male gaze,” something she claims split the “pleasure of looking” between “the active/male and passive/female.” On a platform where a majority of the users and influencers are women, Mulvey’s characterization of them as “passive” no longer holds water. However, this begs the question: why does overt and overwhelming sexualization of women persist on a platform where they are the most active participants? I submit it all goes back to our desire for intimacy.

As we have already seen, sex is a surefire way to garner attention. However, leaning into sex appeal on platforms like Instagram can also bring a kind of affirmation and even affection from thousands, if not millions, of adoring fans who comment things like, “Love your body!” and “Girl those aaaaabbbssss” on photographs of models dressed in lingerie. In an interview with Buzzfeed, the model just referenced even said “I love the sense of connectivity I feel with my followers and the people I follow. I love the body-positive movement and seeing people be real about themselves online to some degree.” If the sense of connectivity comes at the price of posing for millions in lingerie, it is a price that many young women are willing to pay. It isn’t even considered strange.

Perhaps this is because in the modern day, sexuality and intimacy have become so intertwined that the former is taken for the latter most of the time. I think speaker and author Sam Allberry put it best when he said,

“In our culture we’ve really mashed intimacy and sex into one another, and so we can’t conceive of any intimacy that isn’t ultimately sexual intimacy… But you can have a lot of sex in life and no intimacy… you can also have a lot of intimacy in your life and not be having sex.”

This is as accurate as it is anathematic in our day and age, and for many of Instagram’s billion-plus users, this tragic truth is still on its way, still traveling. It has not yet reached their ears, hearts, or heads. Instead, millions of users continue to put themselves and their bodies on display in the hopes that they might achieve a sense of genuine connection and intimacy. Or perhaps, that they might simply be valued for something, even if just their bodies. That, I believe, is an important and understandable corollary because at the end of the day, I think this mass capitulation to sexualization and objectification can be credited not to a waning desire for intimacy but to a concurrent and crippling fear of irrelevance and insufficiency. 

In his book The Silence of Animals, Professor John Gray of the London School of Economics alludes to this, writing, 

“If you have no special potential, the cost of trying to bring your inner nature to fruition will be a painfully misspent existence. Even if you have unusual talent, it will only bring fulfillment if others also value it. Few human beings are as unhappy as those who have a gift that no one wants.”

Value is determined by how much someone else is willing to pay for the thing on display, and for a human being to be found wanting, perhaps even worthless, in that way is, to put it simply, devastating. No one wants to be told that they are unworthy, and in an age where we are inundated with images all vying for our attention, it’s not even a matter of being worth someone else’s time. You may not even be worth the barest glance of someone else’s eyes. 

Thus, it is all too easy to see why sex is the go-to thing to put on display since, as has already been stated, it is always going to be attention grabbing. It is always going to be worth something. “Sex sells!” as they say, and this reality has paved the way for a new and opportunistic kind of connectivity. 

Since its inception, Instagram has been a place where any enterprising or industrious individual could make a bit of cash. However, in recent years, it has become a place where so-called and often scantily clad “influencers” and Instagram models can actually make a sizable, even staggering, living by working with brands and collecting sponsorships. In effect, Instagram has evolved from a social-network to a kind of social-marketplace. Thus, instead of intimacy, those lucky few able to accrue enough interest are looking for (and getting) money. Instagram, to them, is a business, and if that requires looking or behaving a certain way…

Well, you have to pay to play.  

However, Instagram’s evolution from a sex-laden social-network to a sex-laden social-marketplace has not been without controversy. The vast majority of Instagram’s users are not influencers, but influenced, and the endless stream of air-brushed, size-zero, and probably, even unapologetically, photo-shopped Instagram models has led many to charge the platform with promulgating an unrealistic standard of beauty.

Interestingly, these critics have rarely, if ever, taken umbrage with the sexual or body-centric component of the marketing or imagery. The criticism has not been “Maybe people should wear clothes again and perhaps focus on things besides their bodies,” but rather “More people should get naked forthwith!” It is an exceedingly sad race to the bottom but not an unexpected one. After all, the mash-up of sex and intimacy persists, making the valuation of bodies predictably preeminent. Put simply, to affirm someone’s body is to affirm their worth as a human being. That is the assumed ideology hidden within the cry for “body positivity.” Thus, in their own way, the critics of Instagram’s unrealistic standards of beauty have seeded the platform’s ethos into an even greater community. “Let us make more of man into an image,” they say.

And they wonder why people are so unhappy. 

Revisiting Debord brings this peculiar and sad reality into greater clarity. Put simply, the critics and the influenced have been blinded by spectacularity. Instagram has simply overtaken them.

In Society of The Spectacle, Debord states, 

“Absolute conformism in existing social practices, with which all human possibilities are identified for all time, has no external limit other than the fear of falling back into formless animality. Here, in order to remain human, men must remain the same.”

Applying this to Instagram, it is easy to see the ascension of conformity packaged as body positivity. The question of whether the sex-laden spectacle produced by Instagram is, itself, wrong is not in play. Rather, it is the question of why can’t more people participate? However, the fact of the matter is this has not made people happy. The reality is actually depressing, and it fits with one of Debord’s opening theses:  

“The specialization of images of the world is completed in the world of the autonomous image, where the liar has lied to himself. The spectacle in general, as the concrete inversion of life, is the autonomous movement of the non-living.”

Calling Instagram users self-deceived, “non-living” beings seems a bit extreme; however, by their own hand, many of them have essentially become or desire to become little more than objects on a screen. A sexual projection that can be objectified or identified with and swiped away if they are found to be wanting in some way. This is sad. Very sad, actually, and eventually, it reveals its essential poverty.

In Debord’s own words,

“What hides under the spectacular oppositions is a unity of misery. Behind the masks of total choice, different forms of the same alienation confront each other, all of them built on real contradictions which are repressed. In both cases, the spectacle is nothing more than an image of happy unification surrounded by desolation and fear at the tranquil center of misery.”

There is a unity of misery at play in the hearts and minds of millions today thanks to the machinations of platforms, especially those like Instagram that are almost wholly image based. The intimacy that people desire and have been seeking in a world of ever-expanding connectivity has not materialized. Indeed, on platforms confined to a screen, intimacy is simply out of reach. All that is left to be had is attention and affirmation, so instead of being seen and known, many have thrown themselves into being seen alone, displaying and even commodifying themselves in the hopes that, for a moment, they might have someone’s affection. Even if it’s fleeting. Even if it’s remote. However, the fact remains that the price of selling oneself is oneself, and whatever might be received in exchange will always, always, be worth less than the price that was paid.

Problems in Postmodernism. Spring 2020.