When I was about 20 years old, I shared a picture on Instagram every week. And my friends regularly shared snapshots, too. Pictures’s of a mural in Berlin, #throwbacks to days gone by or a pair of trampled Vans at a festival. It was the time of the hipsters. A word that you used almost daily back then, but has now totally disappeared.
And now that I'm thirty, it's not just the hipsters that have disappeared. The “social” of social media is also slowly fading away. Don't get me wrong. The social aspect is still there, heus… In IG Stories, on Snapchat or at the end of the year with the annual recap. But that social media is becoming less social, many can agree.
On the one hand, this is due to the entry of brands, content creators and influencers. Each has its own reasons for being constantly visible. Marketers swear that posting daily is “good for the algorithm”. And for example, did you know that 60% of people feel a friendly connection with an influencer? Simply because they share their lives with you on a daily basis and they thus ‘maintain that friendship’ with their community.
This flood of content caused the personal touch of you and your friends to fade into the background. Tóch we didn't stop posting. We just stopped sharing our own faces.
In the days of Sex and the City, before my time, that is, before my time, character Carrie Bradshaw frolicked around in the latest outfits every episode. Fashion had long been an outlet for the happy few, but it took off again in the 00’s. Through social media, iconic moments such as the meat dress (Gaga) and KimK in Marilyn Monroe's dress followed. Generations grew up with makeup videos by Nikkie Tutorials and terms like #Getreadywithme, #Fashiondupes, #Skinimalism. Fashion became a way to showcase yourself to the world. But fashion has long since ceased to be the only coat in which social media shrouds....
Pinterest shows it: of all the content on the platform, a whopping 23 billion pins are about interior design. It is by far the biggest category, bigger even than fashion. And that's no coincidence.
Instagram has picked up interior design as the perfect way to show yourself without showing yourself. Less vulnerable, less narcissistic, but just as personal. Or is it?
There's a good chance you'll see the following items come by: 1. the Juicy Salif lemon squeezer, which no one uses, 2. Stoff Nagel candle holders, which feature unburned candles, or 3. the donut lamp from IKEA that most don't even know who the designer is (Sabine Marcelis).
Don't have a (donut) lamp lit yet? Last shot: the Le Creuset salt and pepper mill. Who doesn't own it?
The question that looms: is this taste or algorithm? Design is no longer designed for timelessness, but for timelines.
Even IKEA, so to speak, has changed tack. IKEA is renowned for democratizing furniture, but is now also (increasingly) tackling content. Gustaf Westman launched his IKEA collection not because of his revolutionary furniture, but because of his high number of followers. And who can blame IKEA either?
So maybe this new form of selfie is indeed less narcissistic than endless selfies. Or maybe we just found another way to do the same thing we always do: seek validation, get recognition, be seen.
Tóch it seems to me it's time to show your face again. After all, no matter how many likes your living room gets. It's people who love you, not your coffee table.
One of the solutions to make social media more social again comes from unexpected quarters. On Instagram these days, you can select the option to see only the content of the accounts you follow. That content is loaded, as always, chronologically. Without recommendations. Without algorithms. You decide what you follow and see. So you see, even Instagram is harking back to an old #throwback trend with this #throwback.
Should that unexpectedly not work, Mediahuis may offer a solution. It may decide to bring back Hyves. It still owns the url after all these years. I foresee a lot of selfies and scribbling.
