Life in an Insta age
Peel back the layers on the wildly successful social media site and there is cultural gold to be found.
Like it or loathe it with every inch of your being, Facebook is still king of the social media sites. The most recent data suggests the networking giant boasts a phenomenal 2.6 billion active monthly users, a figure that represents a third of the world’s population. While it stands, untouchable, atop the social media mountain it is true, for what it’s worth, to say Facebook doesn’t have the cool factor it once held. Once the kids realised mum and dad — and, heaven forbid, grandma and grandpa — had jumped on board, they began fleeing elsewhere (though, tellingly, they didn’t delete their accounts). Video-sharing service Tik Tok is the social media tool du jour for those in the know, which is why, as someone not in it, I’m not on it. But Tik Tok doesn’t come close to Zuckerberg’s digital giant for global reach. Only messaging services WhatsApp (owned by Facebook) and Chinese behemoth WeChat come anywhere near approaching the sort of influence enjoyed by the baby Zuckerberg birthed as an undergrad at Harvard, and even then they are at best an Everest base camp to Facebook’s summit. Loitering around No 7 on the top 10 list of social media services, however, is Instagram (also owned by Facebook).
Insta is widely recognised as a unique sharing platform, and perhaps as the one that most closely approximates art, or at least an art gallery. It is a picture-sharing site. No links, no digital soapbox from which to pontificate: it is purely about aesthetic. That’s not to say, of course, Instagram is free of vapidity and the sort of pouty-mouthed navel gazing that seems to have defined a generation’s global family photo album; indeed, selfies remain the site’s stock and trade. But peel back the layers and there is cultural gold to be found. When the site emerged on the scene photographers feared it would be the death of their livelihoods. It is true to say on the whole it has done the profession, as it stood, no favours. But for those photographers who adapted early it has been a ticket to success. The purists will never agree with the maxim that everyone is a photographer now, and nor should they. But Teju Cole, the brilliant American novelist, photographer and photography critic at the New York Times, has an answer for that. Cole, an engaging, philosophical and artistic presence on Instagram, embraced the platform early, seeing it as a tool for the evolution of photography as opposed to a limiting of its artistic powers. Cole has surmised: “Instagram, like any other wildly successful social media platform, is by turns creative, tedious, fun and ridiculous.” Furthermore, he sees the platform as an exhibition space beyond “the wall of the museum and the pages of a book”. Which brings us to Ballarat, and today’s cover story. The Ballarat Foto Biennale, like every other art event around the country, has shifted its focus online. And, as Matthew Westwood writes on Pages 4-5, it is collating images of life in isolation for a specially curated Instagram exhibition called Mass Isolation. The images are breathtaking and the exhibition an idea of great scope and vision. We all have our own tales of home and isolation, and what better way to tell them than through the universally understood and accessible medium of photography. Great art has always reflected the prevailing themes of the day. Who would have thought we’d find it on Instagram?
review@theaustralian.com.au
READ MORE: Editor’s letter: On the tiles | #MeToo during lockdown