Filling the Space Inside of Us
how the instagram redesign is capitalizing on a pandemic
We all have deep crevices within us, vacant space we are constantly trying to fill up. We are born empty and over time and with experience we learn various ways to fill all of the internal gaps, the places where we feel longing and missing. We alleviate the suffering of this emptiness by filling it with all kinds of things. When appropriately nurtured, we are full of love and care from friends and family. When we feel steady, accomplished and are reaching goals we feel gifted and we maneuver through this life with a wholeness from our success and achievements.
We ebb and flow between the richness of life and the times of utter desperation and solitude. Sometimes getting stuck with longing that doesn’t feel like it will go away. During these harsh times humans grasp onto whatever will make them feel better. We fill ourselves with the quick and easy. We indulge in fake relationships, we turn to drugs and alcohol and we start to get fed the idea that we can clean our insides with things. The more stuff around us the better, the more stuff we buy the better, utilizing material objects to fill the gaps where pieces seem to be missing.
And the hardest thing to do is turn away from the stuff, the materialism, the consumerism. It is constantly and overwhelmingly shoved towards us, it feels inescapable. It’s every email, every commercial, every targeted ad. It’s the feeling that to escape this individualized marketing campaign we would have to forgo the connections we achieve on every platform we utilize.
So at a time when collectively human beings are feeling more alone and more isolated than ever, as we spend even more time on our devices to connect with the outside world, during a period in which we are trying desperately to find normalcy while dealing with a pandemic, Instagram has decided not to protect the user but to manipulate us into further consumer downfall.
The favored social media platform overnight solidified its standing as a shopping application. We would be silly to think that this change was immediate because in actuality it has been slowly happening for a long time. It began with suggested ‘friends’ who were actually just companies, then morphed into curated ads, eventually it seemed every post was a click to buy image and every person was there to sell us something. Instagram monetized our weakness, took advantage of our loneliness and is profiting off of our inability to live our chosen lives.
While all of us feel more alone than ever and can literally not connect with friends and family, be involved with our communities and enrich our lives with hobbies, Instagram redesigned its platform so that when we automatically tap on what used to be a notification of who likes us it is now an online mall. A heart turned into a shopping bag. Literally taking the acknowledgement of care and love from friends and family and turning it into buying this stuff will make you feel safe and comforted. The line is direct.
The long term mental health implications of covid-19 are still very much unknown to us. Experts expect that we will collectively experience post traumatic stress and at a time when we should all be giving extra thoughtfulness to how we treat and care for one another, Instagram has chosen their path. Instagram and its parent company Facebook believed that this was an ideal opportunity to take advantage of us. On a good day it feels an egregious act and on a bad it is simply predatory. Without any consent from the user, without any empathy of our current day to day, Instagram chose profitability over responsibility.