Are your friends also whisked away in your feed?

Antisocial social media: More people watch, fewer share. The influencers fill up. The friends and everyday life are gone. We have all fled into the chat groups.

Just get out and take your grey selfies with your head held high. You don’t have to impress anyone. Let the kids complain, the influencers entertain — and “call” a friend. Social media is a socially dead place to waste your time | Photo: Getty Images / Alexander Nordahl

[This is a machine-translated version of the original Danish article published in Kommunikationsforum on Sept 07, 2023]

CHRISTIAN VILLUM

Friends have slipped. What do you do and how why?

While your dishes pile up and your kids complain about the liver pate food you just slammed on the table for them, the people in your Insta feed live the fat life. They have unique experiences, do dreamlike pseudo-work, have perfect bodies and are always funny in just the right meme-like way. On the other hand, your actual friends are rarer and rarer guests in your feed. What’s going on?

It is a trend where we as the audience are watching, but less and less often contribute ourselves. Instead, we get an outlet for our social needs in a meta-track in private groups — a kind of backchannel — where brands and influencers can’t reach in.

Here it is clear that something has changed in our digital lives. Where, for example, are all the other ordinary people on social media? Has the world just become cool while stagnating in a reality of mediocrity and half-tacky gray selfies?

Influencers and professional content creators now fill your feed

Fortunately, the answer is no: Instagram has changed. Specifically, the algorithm is set to favor content that may seem personal, but is essentially produced and curated tightly. In other words, influencers and professional content creators are floating at the top of the stream, and this has pushed all our holiday shots, city trip selfies and cat pictures into the background.

Ordinary people share less now

However, it’s not just the algorithm that has made your feed a cross between Vanity Fair Magazine and an episode of The Kardashians. As a result of the downgrading of regular content, more and more users have dropped posting to the public and have instead resorted to using the “Close Friends” feature. It is a feature where you can decide for yourself which circle of people receives your posts.

The exodus from the social platforms is underway

Adam Mosseri, Instagram’s CEO, has directly admitted that there is a massive flow from public posting to close friends posting — and even an exodus from the platform. The latter group, according to other news reports, is instead switching to group chat apps, like WhatsApp, Signal, and Telegram. The dynamic is the same: We don’t want to try to measure ourselves against perfect ideals, no matter how obviously posed or fake.

You “insta’ed” your life and followed the insta’s everyday life of others. It was an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of your friends and family, and the eye level was a focal point… But that is no longer the case.

Social media has become traditional broadcasting media

In essence, social media is actually moving from being, well, social, towards a role like more traditional media. It is a trend where we as the audience are watching, but less and less often contribute ourselves. Instead, we get an outlet for our social needs in a meta-track in private groups — a kind of backchannel — where brands and influencers can’t reach in. In there, you can lower your guard and avoid comparisons — and be more yourself with friends rather than polishing a façade that doesn’t measure up to Instagram’s curated utopia of a dream reality.

The good old Insta is gone

Instagram started out as the perfect place for immediate, visual interaction for ordinary people. It became a de facto way to communicate visually with friends as Facebook and Twitter drowned in political controversy. It even became a verb, along the lines of “Googling” something: You “insta’ed” your life and followed other people’s insta’s everyday lives. It was an opportunity to see the world through the eyes of your friends and family, and eye level was a focal point. It didn’t have to be perfect as long as you agreed to be imperfect. A filter on and off you go with your silly festival photo.

But that is no longer the case.

From #nofilter to #altidfilter

The filters were the beginning of the end of the original Instagram. Suddenly, we became aware of what we really looked like without filters, and that led us to create and nurture avatars of ourselves that were more flawless than the carnal version. “#nofilter” became an unusualness, a curiosity, and soon it was fallow deer eyes, sucked-in cheeks and Juno filter on everything. The particularly talented went viral, got sponsors, started earning serious sums of money from product placement, and we learned that “influence” had nothing to do with a severe cold. Now it was a job. The spiral towards today’s glossy lifestyle medium had been set in motion.

Instagram has a karma problem

But it’s not just us mere mortals who have become disillusioned with Instagram and the other glossy social media. The popular Danish singer Jada has openly talked about how she only reluctantly moves onto Instagram when her record label or manager asks her to promote a new record or an upcoming concert. In between these posts, she often deletes the app and then installs it again when prompted to post again. There is no good energy in there, reflects the Danish supertalent, who is known and admired as a symbol of body positivity.

Make Instagram Instagram again

Other young people and celebrities have also come together and tried to put the brakes on the transformation of their favorite social media. Tati Bruening, a 22-year-old American, started the “Make Instagram Instagram Again” campaign and got the backing of reality star Kylie Jenner. This prompted Meta, which is behind Instagram, to turn back the algorithm. But the race was over. Glitter was in, grey weather was out. This paved the way for more changes. Video was prioritized, and later came live streaming and eventually shopping. This has caused many to pull their horns. If I don’t sell or promote anything, what should I be able to contribute to an open feed? The same is seen on other platforms, even on the new cool boy/girl in class: TikTok.

Furthermore, all this can also be seen as part of a general slowdown of interest in social media as self-promotion for the ordinary user. The Instagram director, Mosseri, says that especially the behavior patterns of the very young give an indication of where we are going.

“Teens spend more time on direct messages, DMs, than they do on stories. And they spend more time on stories than they do in their feed.” It can be seen as a desire to be part of more niche communities rather than shouting into the ether, which research from various leading knowledge institutions also points towards.

This background is not new and has been described in both analyses and mainstream media since 2015–2016 — also here at Kforum. What’s new is that we stick to being entertained by professional content while returning to the old virtues of chatting with our friends when we need a social fix.

It reminds me of a handwritten sign I saw on the counter of the hip hot dog stall Crif Dogs in New York’s hip East Village a few years ago: “No wi-fi. Talk to each other. Call your mom. Pretend it is 1993.” Besides the lack of Wi-Fi, the rest must be said to be a sharper vision of the future than the young guys behind the counter probably realized. Replace 1993 with 2023, and that’s not entirely beside the point.

In other words: just get out and take your grey selfies with your head held high. You don’t have to impress anyone. Let the kids complain, the influencers entertain — and “call” a friend.