Author Antra Saxena
A few days ago I started noticing a trend in my thinking. As you all are well aware, folks have a tonne of time on hand because of Covid-19 related lockdown. I am no different, I have picked up and quickly abandoned plenty of “hobbies” only to come back to the one that has always engaged me the most: writing and putting my opinions out in the world for everyone to judge. Alas, I digress.
Coming back to the trend I mentioned, for a few days, I have been noticing that I have started to think in terms of Instagram post. To elaborate further, I seem to measure each experience I have as a post on “the gram”. For example, while riding my bike (another hobby that I picked up thanks to self-quarantine), I came across beautiful scenery near our local National Park Zoo, Van Vihar Bhopal. Immediately I took out my phone, clicked the scenery, and posted it on insta. It was almost like a knee jerk reaction. What worried me the most was my thought process on seeing the beauty that lay in front of me, I started describing it in my head as if I was writing a caption!
Now don’t get me wrong, I am as much of an Insta feed binger as the next guy/girl and I am not fighting any battles with social media addiction (as of yet!) but I am interested in a more focussed life. And this really got me worried. Has Instagram forever changed the way we perceive experience, will we start looking at everything and add a parameter of judgment to it by thinking about how it will look like on our grid/wall?
So I decided to do a little experiment. I will try to change how I use Instagram and hopefully develop tools to engage with social media in a healthy manner and (hopefully) equip myself with ammunition to face the next big thing in the social media market that replaces Instagram.