Storytelling at a more… relaxed pace causes online confusion
Every time I turn on my laptop, there is a fresh picture of a different and fascinating location somewhere in the world – a lighthouse on a rocky volcanic outcrop, the bleak beauty of a scorched desert, or an icescape in which a seal peers impishly into the camera lens.
I don’t think about it much. I assume there is, somewhere in the Microsoft dungeons, a database of pictures that photographers haven’t been properly paid or credited for that is being fed into a program that randomizes them and spits one out every 24 hours in an attempt to get users to click on a link that will take them to Bing, bumping up their click-count to, oh… double figures. Possibly because there is an established continuity to new pictures of lovely places arriving on cue in that context, looking for and expecting such content from Instagram users who spend a fair amount of time traveling is a popular way of visiting new destinations vicariously, particularly because you can curate what you see.
All of which makes it fun to mess with their expectations – even if you don’t mean to. In terms of folks who regularly use social media, there are those who use it as more or less live reportage of their day-to-day lives:
“This is the glamorous muesli I had for breakfast! This is the fabulous traffic light at which I was stuck for 27 minutes on the way to work! This is a selfie I took at my desk, in which you can see the password for my company server on my computer screen! This is the fish stew Meryl from HR warmed up in the microwave! And this is me realizing I left my lights on this morning and am going to need a jumpstart before I can drive home!”
Then there are those who save the daft memes their friends send them before recycling them (sustainable internet use!) and who close their eyes, scroll through their gallery app, and poke their finger at random at a picture they took on a whim because a bright color or the glint of light on a surface caught their eye – they’re starlings with arms and hands, essentially. And that is the material they post on any given day, simply because it came up in their logic-free routine.
“So, I see you were in Namibia yesterday.”
“Was I?”
“Yes – that picture you posted!”
“…?”
“The photo with the desert rhino in the background. You’re so lucky – I thought they were extinct!”
“Um, they might be, actually…”
“What do you mean?”
“That picture was from 2011. I think it’s stuck with me through seven phone changes and three career changes.”
“Ah.”
Conservation scandals aside, such haphazard storytelling does seem to bother some people, and, to be fair, not everyone has the opportunity to travel as much as they’d like. But if you’re following such a picture poster on Instagram as a way to experience the world through their eyes, perhaps just imagine that the travel agent who booked your proxy journey was on tik and had booked all the specials on offer for the same week – every week.
Text | Bruce Dennill
Photography | Kaspars Grinvalds
