Instagram Minions

When we update our Facebook for the first time in many months, we sometimes draw up the expectation to get immediate responses. The same is true for most of our social media accounts because we sometime get use to getting a lot of feedback and therefore tend to expect the same in each post, even our Medium post. Could it be that we are focusing on getting the likes more than the actual content that we post online?

The last time I posted on Facebook was back in 2012 and from then on I never posted anything. Reason for this was because nobody in my small circle of friends was posting anything nor was there anything really going on besides the annoying game request. Where I saw more user interaction was in two new platforms, Instagram and Snapchat. I opened accounts in both and stared to interact with the same people but in different social media platform.

Most of the people that I was interacting with were following trends that were never really present on Facebook such as WCW, TBT and the infamous hashtag (#). Over time I realized that I was also following these trends and in a way was viewing followers as potential likes. The transitioning of people to heart shaped like buttons was interesting to me since most of the people that I was interacting with on Instagram were people that I interacted with on social media, but there wasn’t the same amount of interaction in real life as on social media.

I saw how many of my friends and I were so caught up getting the like button that we would often go looking for the prefect picture to post on social media in order to get those likes. What I’m trying to argue is that if we become invested in anything we can sometimes start to forget that there are people like us around us that we can interact with. Also the people that are following us in any social medium are people and not minions that will like every post we put on our accounts. That same can be said if we were to flip the situation.

If we see that our favorite artist hasn’t posted anything in a while and then post something amazing, we tend to like their post. It’s almost as if we become the objects because the amount of like that own favorite celebrity gets is huge and sometimes our like or share isn’t really significant to them. Take for example Beyoncé. The amount of likes she gets per post is roughly 2.1 million per post (just an average, no real math done). Since she doesn’t follow anyone I would see this as a mean to see if she is still relevant. In a we are mostly just numbers on her account. In other words we are no longer humans but rather stats.

In the book Reel World there was a reflection upon how we tend to dehumanize people because we become so invested in our work. I think it’s okay to be focus and become engaged in your work, hobby or whatever but be aware that the people that we interact with are humans and we must acknowledge them as such.