The Instagram Generation and Radical Openness..

Article by Conor Smith

So there’s a fascinating article doing the rounds in the blogosphere, in which someone has coined this generation of people, ‘The Instagram Generation’. Basically implying that as soon as the people of this generation experience wonder and awe we are instilled with an immense feeling of sadness because we are cognisant and aware of the fact that however wonderful and amazing the moment feels, it will undeniably pass, inducing an overwhelming need to capture and immortalise the moment by taking a video or photo and sharing it with others via social media (hence we are called ‘The Instagram generation’). So while we are actually having the experience, we are semi-consciously thinking about how we are going to preserve the moment, splitting themselves into two halves: the experiencing self and the remembering self.

A very famous Professor Of Psychology, Daniel Kahneman, originally proposed the idea in his 2010 Ted Talk: The Riddle of Experience Vs. Memory, in which he says..

“There is an experiencing self, who lives in the present and knows the present. It is the experiencing self who the doctor approaches when he asks ‘does it hurt now when I touch you here?’. The remembering self is the one who keeps score and maintains the story of your life. It is the remembering self who the doctor approaches when he asks ‘how have you been feeling lately?”- Daniel Kahneman.

The experiencing self is the self that is completely present and taking in all the information of the moment. The remembering self is the self that keeps the information of the moment and stores it in its data banks. I like to think of the two as the RAM and ROM of the human consciousness.

One would think that because the Instagram Generation split themselves into two halves when experiencing wonder and awe they are not truly present and therefore cannot truly appreciate the moment. That the invention of social media has made us more interested in sharing the moment then actually experiencing it fully.

In my opinion I think that there is a truth in this, but it’s not a terrible one. The invention of social media has definitely made us more interested in sharing the experience. But this is a good thing. The intense sharing of ideas and experiences has given birth to something called ‘radical openness’.

“Radical transparency (openness) is a phrase used across fields of governance, politics, software design and business to describe actions and approaches that radically increase the openness of organizational process and data.”- Dictionary Definition.

Radical openness is described as the free exchange of information. It’s the 1960’s counter culture computer hacker state of mind. When Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple, invented the very first pieces of the personal computer, he wanted to take it to the tech community and completely open source it. Have others work on it to see where they might take the invention to. Only for the young Steve Jobs intervening and convincing Wozniak how bad of a decision it would be, we might be looking at a completely different world right now. Crazy as it sounds, it’s true.

As philosopher and English professor Martial Mchluhan used to say..

“First we build the tools, then the tools build us..”- Martial Mcluhan

We build these tools and then how we use them shape our culture. I always like to give the example of the ‘selfie’ when explaining this. We built the phone, which enabled us to take pictures, which enabled us to take selfies, which became a globally recognized phenomenon. Somebody says they’re going to take a picture with you, they say they’re going to take a selfie. The act of taking a selfie is now ingrained into our culture because we invented the phone. What we design, designs us back.

So what radical openness does is, it allows us play off each other. Bringing this full circle to the Instagram Generation, as soon as he or she has taken that photo/video and preserved the moment, the next step he or she should take is to upload it somewhere online and share it in an act of complete transparency with other people. When you hit the ‘post’ button what you’ve done is allowed people to access and view that moment. To almost experience it themselves. You might not realize it but this spawns huge levels of inter connectivity.

X might be scrolling through his/her news feed, see your photo/video and be inspired to maybe recreate that moment and post it on his/her news feed. Y sees X’s post and is inspired to recreate that moment and post it on his/her news feed. So forth the cycle continues.

People think that doing this is copying but really it’s not. You might be inspired to recreate that moment but you’re not going to truly be able to because it’s going to have your own twist on it. You’re not going to be in the exact same environment or in the exact same position as the person who posted the original photo/video. So therefore it’s not copying at all.

Some people consider the great William Shakespeare to have been a plagiarist, somebody who copied other people’s work and passed it off as his own. He didn’t copy, he took elements of other stories/poems and inserted them into his own, in turn creating something entirely different to the things he took from.

So now that we know how big of an impact radical openness has, can we just take a second to give it the recognition it merits? Imagine a world without radical openness. It would be hard to. This is why the privatization of information should be viewed as tragic. When you hit that ‘discard post’ button you are slamming the door and saying a big fat ‘NO’ to all possible innovations that could stem from the sharing of the experience. Like Brain Games presenter Jason Silva says in his ode to ideas..

“Imagine how impoverished this world would have been if we hadn’t invented the technology of the oil painting in time for Van Gogh or the technology of the musical instrument in time for Beethoven or Mozart.”- Jason Silva

It’s crazy how we take some of this stuff for granted, the internet, social media, when they allow us to share our experiences, express our opinions, get our ideas out there and innovate on new incredible levels close to ineffable. All through a couple clicks and key strokes. My mind goes into overdrive just thinking about it.

Here’s to the conservation and immoralization of information..

If you enjoyed any part of this post I urge to hit that “recommend” button and follow me for future articles. It really helps me out. If you want to write a response with what you thought, I would love to hear your opinions. Thank You. :) - Conor