Instagram is hypnotizing. It really is. I have fallen deep into the your-eyes-are-getting-heavy spell of this app. Instagram is about a spectator getting to enter someone’s life through visual images that have been captured digitally and displayed through a series of scrolling galleries. The range of visual availability is endless, even though things get pigeon holed in the sunset, food, coffee and cloud categories, and more than not, the “selfie” category. Yet the possibility of visual arrest is endless. Look at the world we live in, it’s vast and ever evolving. How much beauty do we rendezvous with on a daily basis…it’s unbounded. But the more and more I burrow into the personal pockets of those coupling with this puissant app: I grapple with human disregard for the things that are outwardly.
When I stumble upon, or strategically navigate, onto a profile page that makes allowance for 900 pictures of the authors face, I immediately suspect a sincere problem. Questions that quicken to and accompany my longing to problem solve: is this person missing that perfect angle to get the pièce de résistance? Or perhaps when taking their selfie breaks, their earned six pack just got more slightly chiseled than yesterdays? Or maybe it’s a brand new body oil to shine up that physical Chrysler that has to be captured under the brand new installed light bulb in the desk lamp? Perhaps there is a persistence for the greatest reward we learned to honor ourselves with, developed from our harmful junior high training programs: popularity? I’m being vicious I know, but I’ve become so disturbed as a fellow human of these narcissistic authors because they are using brilliant technology as a way of giving allowance to peripheral prostitution.
Then it dawned on me: visual prostitution is our culture. An iPhone (or enter the phone of your choice) in our hands relieves us of having to truly connect with people, it steals our time to frolic in imagination, to sit and listen to a symphonic summer evening, it keeps us connected to the Facebook/Instagram falsified encouragement system called the “Like” button which many hunger to keep score with, but most importantly it entices us away from true perception and guttural awareness of ourselves. We squander more time marketing our mugs to other people who ping pong their marketing right back to us. If everyone is in the market place selling the same spurious projections, nothing will end up having value. It’s cheap to sell a face, it’s priceless to share a heart.
Where has the value of human gone? Where has the influence and response of being moved by an event, piece of architecture, landscape, theatrical event, international adventure, passionate eyes of another human, or prismatic sunset gone? What has happened to our culture that we can’t look further than the red “capture” button that clones the other 899 copies of our dying mugs. Are we not cognitive of the fact that gravity is not a flawless figurine’s friend?
Move outward. Look beyond you. Turn the camera around to the widespread world that is before you. Allow life, color, words, God’s artistic handiwork to change you, to affect you, to evolve you from egoism to enveloping. Images that are captured by a snapshot share so much of the photographers physical world, but more so, their internal world. May we be avidly active to explore the latter.
