Outside looking in.

Me and my house mate were discussing which one app we wished never existed. I paused cautiously even though I knew exactly what I was going to say. “Instagram” we both soberly stated; musing how although it is an app we check every day, there is dire and desolate thought looming over us that it does impede a certain sense of freedom.

Could you imagine a world in which we lived without the immense pressure of speculating about how everybody lives their lives? Wondering if your life appears intriguing, imposing and tasteful too.

Since lockdown I have felt a certain level of resent to social media. Like others, I post on Instagram because it’s fun, vain perhaps. But it appears I sold my soul when I began to cultivate myself on this app; blindly coerced by the dopamine influx of notifications.

We carve an identity through the lens of Instagram, a false pretence, something which doesn’t really have any meaning. Influencers relentlessly assure and remind us to remember ‘Instagram is just a highlight reel’. As though that seems to justify the way it so skilfully engulfs us.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is a compelling and articulate piece of work which dissects the how, why and what of surveillance capitalism.

Surveillance capitalism is a new term to describe the process in which data is extracted from our technology; unknowingly and dishonestly, to then be sold as a commodity.

Her chapter 16 titled “Of life in the hive” contains a quote on the first page, it reads:

All grew so fast his life was overgrown,

Till he forgot what all had once been made for:

He gathered into crowds but was alone

- W.H Auden, sonnets from China, VIII

Often when I read things that are attempting to unpack and scrutinise the digital world we inhabit; I find myself feeling slightly underwhelmed.

We read articles that state correlations between anxiety and depression with screen time, but it is seemingly difficult to determine the milieu in which our addictions with technology strip us of our self.

However, this chapter eloquently and philosophically describes the psychological effects of social media, otherwise known as 'Big Other’ throughout the book. The author describes a study which resonated familiarly with my own tenacities around the relationship I have with my phone.

1000 students worldwide across 10 countries and 5 continents offered the expected outcome from asking students to withdraw from all technology for 24 hours.

The results are indeed a testament that our interweaved life of mediating between real life and online life elicits a longstanding nervousness in a large majority of us. She says:

“A majority in every country admitted that they could not last the day out being unplugged.”

The author explores how our own inhibitions are not the only reason it is so hard for particularly young people to switch off. Our livelihood is invested in our phone through its capacity to tell us everything we could ever need to know and more.

She continues to delve into the idea that devoted relationships with technology create a level of anxiousness for the way in which people perceive you; researchers have identified this theory as an ‘outside looking in’ approach to how you view yourself.

As younger generations began to engage with social media, simultaneously an important part in our development also known as ‘adolescence’ began to unravel. Adolescence was first identified by an American psychologist in 1904 called G. Stanley Hall, who claimed it as the turbulent years of development that contribute to the foundation of stability in adulthood.

Later psychologists would go onto recognise these years for another theory known as ‘Emerging adulthood’, more prominently known by 2000 by psychologist Jeffrey Jensen Arnett. Emerging adulthood proposes the theory of a stage of life between the years of 18-25 in which distinctly differs from adolescence and young adulthood.

Research has shown that the adolescent years find young people with an alluring and sometimes disillusioning attraction to the ‘peer group.’ Navigating through friendships, love, work and forming our individual response to the world, prises a significant challenge of distinguishing your self from the others.

Connecting this with the world of Instagram paints a picture of the danger for finding an equilibrium between digital life and real life; a subsequent challenge that particularly during lockdown can be hard.

Right now, we live in an environment which is fostering and promoting the nature of comparison. Comparisons of how you spend your confined days, evaluations of what countries are succeeding, and which aren’t, and an accrescent and disconcerting sense of if what you’re doing is enough.

The unknown lingers like a damp smell as we consider meditating what is next. In many ways Instagram can be viewed as a voice of reassurance or justification that the way you live is acceptable to society.

Research suggests that millennials pick up their phones more than 150 times a day, Gen Z is likely to be substantially more.

Very quickly, our reliance upon technology, a dependence which only seems so natural and normal can change to an authorship of one self in which you act without your own conscience, but instead with a nurtured and reared response that is curated through the lens of an illusory sphere.

Shoshana Zuboff says: “Most critical is that the more the need for other’s is fed, the less able one is to engage the work of self-construction.”

More than ever, it is imperative to make the time to switch off from the outside world; to tune out from what everybody else thinks and to ruminate and reflect about what you think. I chose this quote as I think lockdown has provoked some raw feelings of discontentment when seeing how others might be dealing with the situation.

Coming back to the quote we are thrown at by influencers: ‘Instagram is just a highlight reel’, more accurately and conceptually we realise it is not. Although Instagram is integrated into our lives as a communicative, creative and expressive tool, in piloting our own journeys through emerging adulthood, we realise it is merely just an app - a software program with monetary and corporate goals designed to keep you hooked.