When I’m invited to a wedding, I try to say yes, even if the ceremony will be long and boring. En route, I sometimes think how nice it would be to stop for a beer, skip the rites, and arrive in time for what moves me most: the vows. Of course, I never indulge that impulse. I get there on time and sit, bored, because I am there to support my friends, not to be maximally entertained.
But would I make it to the church on time if, on my ride there, a devil on my shoulder tempted me with particular diversions? “Forget the ceremony: Bruce Springsteen is drinking at that brewery!” the imp might whisper. “Look, that elderly man is dazzling teens with playground dunks! Wow, 22-year-olds in bikinis are washing Ferraris outside that mansion! Whoosh, skateboarders are bombing down that hill!”
In my digital life, Instagram is that devil.
When the app launched in 2010, my friends and I loved how easy it was to share images that conveyed bits of our lives to one another. It helped us stay in better touch across time and distance than we might have otherwise. It hardly mattered that some of the photos we posted were, well, boring. But lately, I am starting to hate Instagram. Because my loved ones are still on the platform, I still post there and peruse my feed, but I resent that it actively obstructs my efforts to prioritize them and their posts. I gladly set out to see them. And Instagram keeps tempting me with diversions.
Consider my friends who’ve recently had babies. Posts introducing a newborn often make my feed. I’d like to see all subsequent baby photos, too, to “like” those photos and to glean tidbits that inform future calls, texts, and hangouts, knowing that nothing else looms larger in the lives of new parents.
But as Instagram knows, newborns are boring, except to their parents. (I’ve found they start displaying more personality at about 18 months.) Instead of showing me all available photos of newborns from accounts that I deliberately follow, the social network augments my feed with endless “Reels” (the short-form, TikTok-style video clips introduced back in 2020) that it judges likelier to be engaging.
At this, Instagram’s algorithm excels. Have you ever seen highlights from the Japanese game show Slippery Stairs, where contestants in skintight unicolor suits, pads, and helmets race heedlessly up a long, slick staircase, frequently suffering chain-reaction falls that start to feel like Sisyphean reversals until one competitor persists––they are all barefoot, by the way––and triumphs?
An Instagram post featuring a photo of an especially adorable cat can hold my attention for two seconds. A friend’s cuter-than-average dog: seven seconds. A cousin’s ambling toddler? Ten seconds. I could watch Slippery Stairs for five minutes.
That’s good for Instagram. It has an interest in maximizing the time I spend on the platform, where it sells ads. But it’s bad for me, my family, and my friends. As the art critic John Berger noted in his 1972 essay “Understanding a Photograph,” every photo is “a result of the photographer’s decision that it is worth recording that this particular event or this particular object has been seen.” When posting photos to the site, we are effectively saying: Seeing this was worth recording and sharing with you.
But Instagram no longer simply displays what friends and family want to show me that they’ve seen. Photos and videos that my loved ones share are placed in competition with the most compelling spectacles devised in Japan, just for starters. The platform remains committed to surfacing the most engaging photos posted by people I follow (impressive kitesurfing, Tim!) but otherwise feeds me Reels of Caitlin Clark passing the ball to teammates who don’t catch it, wipeouts at the Wedge in Newport Beach, and a mustachioed man––a chef?––snarkily reacting to amateur cooks’ own short videos. The reels are often deliciously diverting. If I wanted to spend hours on the empty calories of 30-second clips, most of which I’ll forget moments later, I’d re-download TikTok.
I deleted TikTok because while I liked to watch chainsaw-wielding men of unknown qualifications felling tall trees, especially trees growing so close to buildings that falling the wrong way would send trunks crashing through roofs, I’d prefer getting my entertainment from books, films, and pretentious TV. I wanted to use social media to connect with friends and family, even if that sometimes means seeing poorly lit photos of their burrata appetizers. That’s how committed I am to indulging my loved ones.
Meta, Instagram’s parent company, still says its mission is giving people “the power to build community and bring the world closer together.” As it thwarts my efforts to see all the photos posted by people I know and chose to follow, I call bullshit. Injecting Reels in my feed, then refusing to let me abolish those diversions, hasn’t just put my loved ones in competition with viral nonsense––it has repeatedly subverted my attempts to ensure that my loved ones win.
Of course, Instagram doesn’t owe me anything; it’s a free site run by a for-profit corporation. Perhaps it has correctly calculated that viral videos in all feeds will maximize returns for its investors. Nevertheless, I want to patronize at least one platform where I can pre-commit to friends without being exposed to constant temptations to redirect my attention to strangers. While I often stand up to that temptation, I stumble, too, sliding into distraction as helplessly as a man losing his footing on slick ice-stairs.
Most of us will slip, so long as the platforms where we keep in touch with friends and family are the same places where we get our entertainment. I’d pay for a site that focuses exclusively on the wonderful banality of connecting with loved ones. Until such a site exists, and enough of us are willing to pay for it, we are stuck with companies that need us to scroll but not to flourish.