I have "demoted" instagram from its previous role in my life, and I can't recommend it enough.
Hello again, email inboxes. I’ve decided to give this whole email newsletter thing another go (will explain why below). It’s been a while — about 18 months give or take since my last post. Keen readers might notice that I’ve changed the title of the site to be more easily identifying. Time and Place was a fine name, but I think that was just me trying to be all Ethan Iverson about it. Anyway, thanks for reading and I’m planning to post like this more often from here on.
I am very brave
If you are following me on Instagram and/or Facebook, you might have caught the string of story posts I made several weeks ago in which I announced that I would be deleting the above mentioned apps (along with a couple others) from my phone. I understand deleting an app from one’s phone doesn’t seem like the end of the world, and I agree that it isn’t. But I think that at the very least, it will have a positive affect on my mood, sleep and productivity. At most, it could serve to be my prediction of the end of musicians’ dependence on current social media platforms for promotion.
In my final fugue-state of story posting to the app, I coined the term “demoting instagram from my life” to describe the way I was feeling about the whole thing. That is to say the app was taking up more of my time and attention than it deserves, so I am delegating it to doing less important work in my life, ergo its “demotion”. This was the snippet that seemed to garner the most support from those who saw it. Indeed, from my fellow musicians to the fellow who most recently cut my hair, it seems the common theme is that instagram “doesn’t seem to do anything.”
Instagram doesn’t do anything
Of course, this statement is not entirely true. A post on instagram does generally get sent into the home feed of those who are following your account. And depending on how those people have curated their feed, they will be shown that post for about a day before it is no longer suggested to them. However, these days most people using instagram aren’t exactly curating their feeds as much as they are enduring them. Between suggested posts, sponsored posts (subtle ads), regular ads, and shoehorned-in Threads posts (threets?), any attempt at activity feed curation is largely ignored and promptly replaced by what instagram insists you view. But this isn’t just an instagram thing. Lately, it seems every social media platform has become nigh unusable.
For a more on-the-nose example of this phenomenon, If you’ve used twitter.com in the last year (I know it’s called X now, but the url has never changed lol), what I just described might sound familiar. On X, there doesn’t even seem to be an attempt to target ads to your interests the way instagram does. If you open a brand new X account right now, before you even follow your first account, your feed will immediately be rife with crypto gambling or AI girlfriend ads, horrible promoted posts from the outstanding individuals subscribed to X premium, and of course, all of Elon Musk’s posts (delivered via notification by default) like some sinister, cracked mirror version of Tom from MySpace being your first friend on the website. Seeing what twitter had become, what my experience had become, I just couldn’t do it anymore. So, after 5000 tweets (and a few hundred X-posts) since 2007, X has all but been removed from my daily life. But here’s the thing: I don’t miss it, like at all.
a weak addiction, at best
When my grandfather first heard in the 1960’s that smoking was actually dangerous for one’s health rather than beneficial, he up and quit cold turkey the next day. Me removing instagram from my phone: not the same. I am no such man. Something tells me we might have jumped the gun when we started using the word “addiction” to describe heavy use of social media. Don’t get me wrong, there is something to be said about how these apps are specifically designed to function like slot machines. But I think there’s a difference between developing a real addiction that can ruin your life, like with gambling, and forming a strong but ultimately unnecessary habit like with, I dunno… flushable bathroom wipes?
Instagram emulates slot machines for the same reason they created stories and reels: they saw that they worked in other contexts (casinos, Snapchat, Tiktok) and decided to adapt those things to their own platform. That’s basically been the IG playbook ever since Facebook bought the company in 2012: watch competing apps closely for what features are popular and immediately rip off and roll out their own version of said features. Instagram wishes it could be as addicting as gambling is, but it can’t be without real monetary stakes. I’m sure they would develop a means to spray cocaine into users faces every time they viewed an ad for 90 uninterrupted seconds, but the regulatory implications alone are likely not worth the effort.
It might seem like I’m nitpicking when I say there’s a difference between a strong habit and an addiction, but hear me out. I have played the guitar every day for over twenty years. Playing guitar has become what my life revolves around. It gives me immense pleasure to play the guitar, but it can also be frustrating. Sometimes I don’t want to do it, but I do it anyway. I will often do it for hours at a time until I start to feel sore. What I am describing to you is NOT an addiction. I love to play the guitar, but if for some reason I could never play the guitar again, I would not die. It would make me sad for a while, but I would certainly live. There are other ways I can be creative and express myself. I have other things in my life that bring me fulfillment. It would be OK. And I’m sure the majority of people reading this right now (thanks for the support, you two) feel the same way about instagram or X or TikTok; if they disappeared tomorrow, you would be able to toughen up and carry on. This is not how addicts see losing their addiction. I am passionate about playing guitar, but nobody is passionate about Oxycontin. In reality, addicts are often ashamed of their addiction and yet go back to their addiction anyway in spite of their shame.
Shame: a renewable resource
Ask anybody to whip out their screentime stats from the settings of their phone and it will likely be followed by an eye-roll, a heavy sigh, maybe a face-palm. At least in my experience, most of the people I know are made uncomfortable when confronted with the amount of time they spend on their phones — myself included. It feels bad to know that I could have been using my time better simply by putting my phone down and focusing on something else. Despite the constant reminder of this, I kept using the app. Why? An easy excuse is that everybody who is important to me is using it. My friends, my family. We like each other’s stories, we send each other little video clips and links and we talk to each other all within that one app. It really is an amazing tool to have. But there are plenty of other options to stay in contact with my loved ones, so that can’t be it.
Instagram introduced reels in August of 2020. Around the time that it started to be clear that the COVID-19 pandemic was far from over. I remember resenting reels when it got introduced because it was instagram doing their thing of clearly copying tiktok, and I thought that was WEAK and CORPORATE and NOT PUNK ROCK. Not to mention the fact that every other app at the time seemingly simultaneously integrated the same short-form, vertical-scrolling video feed format. Not just social media apps either, like every app. Off the top of my head: FB, IG, Youtube, X, Reddit, and the NBA app (honourable mention: Quibi.)
But after months of resisting, due to a mixture of boredom and convenience, my pretentiousness degraded and I relented. The dull, casino-esque digital sparkle of the feature finally ate away at my pride: I became a lowly reels enjoyer. I thought I had standards. “What happened to me?” I pondered. “What happened to this app?” It felt gross. But alas, day after boring day of the pandemic, no job, locked down in my tiny laneway house, I allowed my consciousness to liquify into hours of scrolling per day. When I put it that way it sounds horrifying, but I know my story isn’t unique. I was ashamed of myself with how much I was using the app, and I believe that’s by design.
Shame can be a deterrent, but it’s often the reason you continue any kind of compulsive behaviour. To me, shame is like feeling humiliated and immediately comforted, completely internally, all within a single moment. Sort of like getting a brain freeze on purpose so I can feel the relief of the brain freeze disappearing. Similarly, I’ll take a glance at the clock at 2:00 AM and realize I have been scrolling an app where I only enjoy a maximum of 5% of the videos that are shown to me for the past three hours and feel my heart sink into my gut. This feeling immediately fuels a mental game of dreaming up rationalizations for the behaviour that I’ve disgusted myself with: Clearly, this is just who I am, or who I must be. I’m online. I’m a musician. I’m a musician online. This is simply what life in 2024 is like. It’s my job to use this app. I haven’t been wasting my time; this is research. This whiplash-inducing process makes me feel all at once sick with shame yet validated and empowered to continue this pattern for as long as I wish.
How did this become my job?
This was not always how instagram was. A long, long time ago: about 2011 or so, there seemed to be a moment where seemingly overnight, everybody was now carrying a smartphone around everywhere they went, and suddenly we all had virtually unbroken access to the internet. It was new, it was fun, and it was a lot more intense for the average person. “Being offline” stopped being a thing for a while. Now, any person could be reached at any time. People were suddenly taking pictures of their food at restaurants and posting them online, but not to brag about what or where they were eating, but really to show off that they own a smartphone and have a data plan to support such activity. So it didn’t really matter what you posted, but the fact that you were posting at all was enough to be cool.
The first few months of my instagram history is filled with some of the darkest-lit, heavily-filtered close-up photos you’ve ever seen of half-eaten, home-cooked college meals and they all have 2-5 likes each (I probably had 15 followers total when they were posted.) At the time, the whole process of taking these mundane photos, editing them, captioning them and posting them to find a few likes and comments within a day or so was an absolute thrill. But that’s really all it was: plain fun.
Today, instagram is all but a mandatory aspect of the modern musician’s trade. Mainly because self-promotion has become the norm for musicians since the beginning of the social media age. Berklee College of Music has offered a course on instagram marketing since 2014. And it makes sense: to promote effectively, one must go where the people are paying their attention. 20+ years ago, if I had a big show I wanted to promote, my options were to post on the local jazz forum, take out an ad in the paper or pay for a radio spot. Some of these options could be pricey and would result in a huge loss if the turnout was bad. Now that everybody’s on instagram, you can promote your shows to all your followers “for free” (if you don’t pay for boosted posts, and if you don’t count your time looking at ads or allowing them to use your data as payment.)
I don’t think that this DIY-ification of the career musician is going anywhere anytime soon (or that it’s necessarily bad), but something tells me that instagram isn’t the end of the road. For one thing, like I stated at the beginning of this piece, there is a resounding sentiment I have sensed from my fellow musicians (and other creatives) that instagram doesn’t seem to do what it’s meant to do for musicians. Some have told me that their promotional posts don’t perform as well as other types of posts, with claims that the system is rigged to discourage promotional material that isn’t paid. I have noticed that promotions for events specifically have a better chance of falling flat compared to other types of content, but I don’t think there’s a conspiracy here.
My personal opinion is that instagram is probably not in fact sabotaging promotional material. Rather, I think it’s more likely that people just don’t care about self-promo, at least if it’s on instagram. But I’m not trying to be bleak here. This is my theory: since people are using this app so heavily, they are encountering advertisements at an unprecedented clip. Because of this, users have constructed a subliminal content filter that allows them to briefly discern when a post that is trying to sell them something. With this “mental adblock”, users can quickly scroll away and get back to the good stuff without the burden of being sold to. The trouble is that earnest attempts at self-promotion and community gathering will get caught in this mind filter. So when you spend hours designing a bespoke poster for your upcoming gig (ahem), then come up with a fun caption that you’re sure the people who will see it should find funny (coughing, choking), you only get a fraction of the engagement you get from posting a silly video because people naturally block it out as it feels too much like an ad. Because of this phenomenon, this makes apps like instagram and TikTok unsustainable as a promotional platform.
To sum up my feelings about the whole process, here’s a conversation I often have with instagram in my brain:
IG: Ok, well in that case, make your promotional material less like an ad, right? Just make a 30-60 second video of yourself speaking directly to camera in a matter-of-fact way on a subject you’re well informed about (or at least make it seem that way). Incorporate music somehow (easy). Speak clearly and don’t be too clever (difficult). This will help you get dozens of new followers.
Me: Amazing! Oh wait, hold on. This video I just made looks a lot like an ad…
IG: Oh yeah, well it basically is, but the type of ad that keeps people using the app, rather than leading people away from the app (like another app or the outdoors).
Me: So an ad for… instagram.
IG: Yeah, but you’re the star of the ad! If you keep doing this, you can probably get 10,000 new followers using this format. So in theory, if 1% of those people come to your show then it’ll be sold out!
Me: Whoa that’s amazing, but don’t most of these people live in other parts of the world?
IG: Yep, that’s true. But you can get them to listen to your music.
Me: Oh great how can I do that?
IG: You can put one tiny little link in your bio.
Me: Ok and what happens when they click the link?
IG: We will show an unsettling warning that they are about to leave the app and go to an unknown place.
Me: Oh, that’s not helpful.
IG: Well it’s helpful for us.
Ok, this job sucks. I quit. What now?
Let’s zoom out and examine twitter.com again. Thanks to Elon Musk’s brilliant leadership through making account verification a paid service, allowing scammers and bots to run wild, and making ads ever more indistinguishable from regular posts, people have left the platform in droves out of pure irritation. Because of this, other players have come in to pick up the pieces and split the user base into multiple companies. Namely: Threads, BlueSky, and Mastodon (dishonourable mention: Truth Social.) That’s right, Elon did such a bad job running the company that he accidentally did antitrust to himself!
But regardless of Musk’s unquestionable leadership, I think the current state of Twitter/X could be an indicator of what we could expect from the Meta and TikTok user bases. We’re already seeing an increasing public distaste with Meta’s general push to remove political content from their apps. And while TikTok is huge, it seems it will probably never touch Meta’s numbers (also seems like it could be legit banned in the US soon?) With so much reach and influence, I foresee a great schism from the legless colossus that is Meta.
People wish to be well-informed. In fact, I believe that’s where this social media obsession came from in the first place: a desire to know what’s going on. Twitter was perfect for that (once upon a time.) Twitter invented the tweet, the micro-blog. Tweets had this charming quality of being either flighty, off-the-cuff commentary or immovable, permanent documents (often both at once.) Think of any major cultural moment in the last 15 years and there’s likely a tweet that perfectly encapsulates the kernel of that moment. You can’t really say that for any of the other social media apps. To me, that’s the reason why people are trying so hard to keep the spirit of twitter going in these other services, it seems too important to let it die because of some weirdo billionaire’s incompetence.
Conversely, instagram in its purest form was never meant to be a place to get news. It was a place to share photos, and like or comment on your friends’ photos. That’s it. It didn’t even have direct messaging built in until 2013. Now it has mutated into a bloated, hyper-stimulating, video-first slot machine for corporations to measure unbroken eyeball time and keep you from ever learning anything important. Instagram’s metamorphosis has been more gradual than twitter’s, but I think we’re well past “the Elon point” of the app being unrecognizable from the thing we fell in love with. At least it is for me.
As for me…
For now I’ll be posting here on substack. At least for now. I like having a robust text editor like this because I can send out a email telling you where I’m playing next along with a goofy graphic and embedded audio link, or a 3000 word diatribe about how “I reckon things just ain’t the way they’s used to be.” I also have a theory that email marketing is just a better way to get people to care about what you’re doing for the long-term compared to social media, and it’s bound to blow up in the DIY musician space (time will tell). You know what they say, “social media is the way into your audience’s brain, but email is the way into their heart.” They don’t actually say that, but they might someday! We’ll just have to wait and see…
Also, if you actually read all the way down to this part, thank you! If you thought it was insightful at all, or think you’d like to read this kind of thing again, let me know. You can also just leave a comment to let me know what you thought.