One of my favorite learning activities is to look up the top Japanese "buzzwords" of the year, a new word usually that's trending in Japan that depicts part of the culture of the country as well as reflects what's popular in the world. Other years it's been "arukismaho," or walking while using one's smartphone (helped by the Pokemon Go craze). In 2017, the top buzzword was "Insta-bae," a word basically meaning to put up an attractive photo of oneself on Instagram, to essentially show off, show others what an awesome life you're living. This type of peacock-like pretentiousness is not limited to Instagram, as people do it on all the other social media sites like Facebook and Snapchat, but it seems more pervasive on Instagram, to the extent it's generated a buzzword in Japan.
I just recently joined Instagram, and I would tend to agree that it's prone to show-offness. Really, the whole idea of social media is to publicize a certain image of oneself, and everyone's conscious of it when they post. The other primary motivation to post stuff is to document one's life and leave a trail for the future when you look back and reflect on one's life, which is what this blog is for!
The whole idea of "followers" too has a direct causal relation with the pretentiousness of the posts. You don't get followers by posting mundane pictures of sitting in traffic or working at the office, you get rewarded with followers by posting more entertaining photos, of depicting the image of a cool person others want to aspire to. It's reflective of today's society where everyone wants to be cool, use the trending lingo (what I call assassination of the English language) where no one wants to be behind the times, and thus we lose our identity. It's like in high school when I looked at how many times I appeared in a yearbook, how good I looked in the school portrait, it's that except it happens every day, not just once every year when the yearbook comes out.
What's depicted on Instagram is not what "life" is to me. Life is working your way out of struggles, dealing with life's ups-and-downs, adapting to situations, being able to handle stress. Once in a while there's that happy "I won a dodgeball championship!" worthy moment to get excited about, and I was guilty of posting it on Instagram (my third ever Instagram post!), and that's what goes on Instagram. What doesn't go on Instagram is the amount of practice hours we put in, how many disagreements we had about how to win, sitting through long hours on a plane getting to the tournament, etc., etc. If life is, as Matt Damon said in "Dogma," just a series of moments, than Instagram is great at capturing those selective series of moments when emotions are high, when one is at their best, but I argue what makes those moments sweeter are the lows and getting through the hardship that doesn't get detailed line by line because it'd be swallowed up by the TL:DR posts.Nowadays, everyone's attention span is really, really short, and if you don't capture someone's attention with something perceived as "awesome," you don't get their attention. (True story: we just moved across the street from our old apartment to our new apartment, MJ saw a lady in the lounge flipping through Gucci bags on her smartphone figuring out what to order, almost losing herself in a sea of options. There's just so much to choose from and so much content to choose from, no one has any time to learn other people's life stories and what makes them really tick, what they've been through. Just the Instagram pics, please, is the message that we get.
Fantasize on,
Robert Yan
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