Where Dreams Lead – Weekend – Kommersant
[ad_1]
Katya Kolpinets, a teacher at the HSE School of Cultural Studies, has written a book about how social networks in general and Instagram in particular created a new mainstream: for millions of people, ideas about their own appearance, work, housing, food and travel are now inseparable from how it all looks in instagram. This social-digital space also leaves its mark on emotions: it requires you to demonstrate some, it forces you to hide others. What type of person does it create – and what will happen to this type in modern times?
Kolpinets is a researcher of digital everyday life, of the environment that has become natural and imperceptible in recent years, like air: in fact, her book tries to make the imperceptible noticeable, to show what kind of chemical composition this air has (forced metamorphoses of this environment in Russia – where is the social network Instagram was blocked by Roskomnadzor, and the Meta company that owns it was recognized as an extremist organization and banned – happened after the work on the book was completed and is reflected in it in the form of a postscript timeline). The fact that Instagram has changed the celebrity culture, the way it undermines users’ self-esteem and erodes self-identification, the conglomerate of businesses that has grown around it — from recording on nails to clandestine plastic surgery, from infogypsy to tourist infrastructure in popular Instagram locations , – in general, not news: but even (and even more so) if the names of Emily Ratajkowski or Elena Blinovskaya are empty words for you, the book will serve as a good introduction to the subject. What is more interesting here is the analytics of feelings, those places where the author dissects intangible matters, showing how Instagram and its competitors change the map of emotions that we experience, and the forms in which we show these emotions.
Instagram began as an application for instant photos: I saw, I took it, I posted it, the recently appeared social network BeReal is built on a similar principle. Likes, stories, numerous filters, and other image editing devices — all this grew later and turned Instagram into a collective desire machine, a tool for visualizing the arithmetic mean dream.
In the 2000s, it was customary to scold the gloss – they say, it imposes average consumption standards; With the advent of Instagram, the authority that sets these standards has disappeared – now they are developed and averaged by the collective mind, the “wisdom of the crowd.” There is an “Instagram face” (and an understandable set of beauty treatments to get closer to it), an Instagram-friendly interior (white walls, vintage furniture, houseplants), a recurring motif of travel photographs—promontory witness, “a lone traveler in a picturesque landscape” (perhaps also define a set of parameters that make the landscape quite picturesque). A significant difference from gloss is that all this should look natural, not simulated: instead of a well-thought-out composition with pre-arranged light, there is a spontaneous impulse, as if by chance caught a moment.
These standards have a dark side behind the scenes: “gray” plastic surgery, rusty pipes in a rented apartment with a minimalist interior, crowds of tourists with selfie sticks waiting in line to take that “lonely photo”. But even without these invisible tears, it takes a lot of effort to create an impression of spontaneity: there is even a special term for a carefully prepared photograph, the hero / yin of which pretends to be accidentally caught / oops – “plandid”. But if people are so killed in order to photograph themselves with a deliberately distant face, then this is necessary for some reason? There are obvious reasons – to get more likes or to demonstrate physicality and / or sexuality, but behind these understandably conceited considerations lies another layer of emotion that this picture should demonstrate. Whatever you post on Instagram, you position yourself as a person with a certain set of qualities and reactions – and there is also an unspoken self-defined standard for this part.
Lightness, carelessness, self-irony, non-attachment to things, openness to new impressions (and willingness to share them), cultivation of light creative “madness” – all this not only creates an image of a person with whom it is “pleasant” and “comfortable”, these qualities also are highly valued in the creative labor market. The chapter about the “dream job” is perhaps the most caustic in the book: if in other sections the reader can even feel some superiority over the simple-minded Instagram mass – they post photos of food from the heart, and you already understand the complex semantics of this gesture – then here in front of the reader , if he lives in a big city and works in the non-manufacturing sector, they put up a rather unflattering mirror.
The requirement to approach work as a means of self-realization, revealing one’s own self – “you must put your soul into what you do” – is so deeply ingrained in the blood of urban culture that it forces people who belong to it to completely unconsciously feign this passion and demonstrate it on public. “Interesting work requires you to constantly experience emotions. Gratitude, inspiration, anticipation of a new project, fear of failure, doubts about one’s own competencies.” With regard to work, whatever it may be, the current city dweller is constantly sublimating his own feelings – and to make them look more natural, enthusiasm for the “best team in the world” must be alternated with complaints about “burnout”. It is clear that in the creative-digital economy, only a small proportion of the employed are “gurus” and “visionaries”, a much larger part is the digital proletariat, engaged in servicing routine processes. However, both need to demonstrate maximum emotional involvement – in order to get from friends, who also follow the unwritten standard, the comment “You are the best!” in response to a post about the opening of a new project or “Further it will only be more interesting!” to the notice of dismissal (even if it is reliably known that the dismissed person wants to scream at this moment from the realization of his own worthlessness). “Whatever you do, it is important to remind every day what an important thing you are doing and why a person idly scrolling through Instagram stories should pay attention to you. “Come”, “This project is important for everyone”, “Repost”, “Subscribe”, “The exhibition will be fire, I put my soul into it”, “I cried with happiness, finishing this project” and so on … The personal brand is no longer arouses interest neither in the person, nor in what this person is doing, “following his passion,” because passion is recognized primarily as a passion for the daily imposition of oneself.
Instagram loves the sincere, those who are open to the world and ready to share with it, but this very openness requires invisible exhausting work: at least a constant focus on which picture or situation is suitable for the next post, and in the case of more or less professional bloggers – also correspondence, planning, production of texts (which should also look like spontaneous and emotional). At the same time, social networks do not just require vivid emotions, but drive this brightness into a rigid framework: relationships with parents, friction with colleagues, personal mistakes and failures almost never fall into the “edited version of me” suitable for stories. Pity, compassion, despair, love. Patterns for denoting love, of course, exist – “she bowed her head to his shoulder with a smile against the backdrop of sunset,” but behind this shot lies not a flash of sincere feeling, but work on building a mise-en-scene. Planid. A social network that demands maximum authenticity makes you hide – or simulate – the most sublime, touching and defenseless spiritual impulses. The imperative to “follow your dreams” and “be yourself” aligns users with a common denominator.
Through the lenses proposed by Kolpinets, it is interesting to look at a wider landscape: thus, in this optics, it begins to seem that the meaning of Sobyanin’s reconstruction of the center of Moscow, as well as the flourishing of creative clusters, is to create the maximum number of instagram-friendly places per unit of urban area ( This was not the intention, but the result is this). Or: perhaps the popular judgment of last summer “Muscovites are sitting on the verandas and forgot about the war” stems from the way Muscovites’ life is presented in social networks – a selfie with aperol on the veranda looks organic on Instagram, and a photo where you quietly howl into a pillow at home , not so much anymore. Or: this image of a creative optimist, moving from project to project, each of which “makes the world a better place”, obviously was not designed for the fact that times will change and instead of frivolous “madness” misfortune and grief will hang in the air? And what is it like now, when everything around is burning and collapsing, to part with this image that set the map of values and behavior patterns? Or: if all of us are not just average Instagram users enthusiastically photographing a plate of poke, but in general everyone who is in the space of social networks, beauty bloggers, public intellectuals, personal growth coaches, officials, oppositionists, military correspondents, we are engaged in modeling our own public identities, and this modeling leaves a mark on ourselves, then where and when are we real? Interest Ask; maybe we should think about it the next time we habitually look for a reason for new stories.
Katya Kolpinets. Dream formula. M.: Individual, 2022
Subscribe to Weekend channel in Telegram
[ad_2]
Source link
