Instagram
On the screen the image appears in faded reds and worn-out yellows, creased and crinkled like an old Polaroid found in a parent's long-forgotten photo album. Oversaturated, a little fuzzy – the chance of film, you might think. But this is not an image scanned and flattened for the computer; it is Instagram, and this photo has always and only ever existed digitally. The supposed imperfections – the colors, the cracks – are the result of an iPhone app specially made to swath the photos of the digital age in a haze of carefully calibrated nostalgia. A simulacrum of the past, and Facebook just bought it for a billion dollars.
The success of Instagram represents the complete mainstreaming of one of American "indie" culture's prevailing values: the rejection of the manufactured present in favor of an individualized reclaiming of the past. Nostalgia is nothing new to the American alternative landscape, particularly that of the early millennium; witness the love of vintage clothing, the post-punk and garage rock revivals and the physical precursor to Instagram, the Holga camera. The Holga, a cheaply made and commercially overpriced toy camera, produced the same kind of blurred and dreamy effects now available en masse via Instagram. Instagram, though, is even more artificial by virtue of its filter's formula, which lacks the element of chance that the Holga, however reactionary, retained.
For the generation slightly older than us, our cool big brothers and sisters, it was hip and even a little radical to knit, wear shabby 50s sundresses and listen to vinyl records of 60s-esque bedroom pop like Belle & Sebastian. The Zooey Deschanel aesthetic, if you will, before Zooey Deschanel got a primetime television show. It was a purposefully naïve aesthetic that borrowed heavily from the visual cultures, fashions and sounds of the 1950s and 60s, born against a mainstream culture scarred by 9/11 and spurred into violence during the Iraq War. For a while it seemed like every girl on Livejournal wanted to inhabit a Godard film.
But now it is the Occupy era and even mainstream culture wants to forget. The cultish innocence of early millennial indie touchstones like the films of Wes Anderson and Miranda July or the music of the Decemberists has turned into the easily reproducible quirk and thoughtless referencing prevalent in mainstream hits like Juno and dull chart-toppers like Mumford & Sons. It was not particularly creative to begin with, and now it has become even more sanitized, more palpable and even less innovative.
With the Facebook acquisition, this trend is about to become even more prevalent, and indeed it already has: glancing at my own feed, Instagram seems to have gained an acceptance shared by even the most disparate of social groups. The hipster siblings of the indie innocents use Instagram right alongside the sorority sisters that have dream-wedding albums on Pinterest. There has been a collapse between high and low cultures that seems to have been postmodernism's gift to us, and I don't think that this is a particularly good thing.
What kind of change can be achieved without a viable American avant-garde, a vanguard of the sort of radical experimentation that leads to progress? Your average thoughtless hanger-on hipster has always existed so I'm fairly unconcerned with them, but what happens when the larger alternative scene – the site where this experimentation is supposed to occur – becomes enthralled and dominated by ideas borrowed from the past? If mainstream culture was accomplishing this kind of cultural innovation I would be unconcerned but, outside of a few pockets like the hip-hop community, itself still often regulated to an outsider status, it generally has not. Instead of innovation, what it really wants is money – and the familiar comforts of nostalgia are almost a guarantee of revenue.
Photography helped turn our memories into physical objects and now Instagram has lent a veneer of individuality, borrowed from nostalgia, to our manufactured past. I read somewhere that our generation remains for the most part indifferent to the allure of advertising, but are we really? I fear that our weakness for the accoutrements of the past might lead to an easy corporate exploitation. Dress something up in some kind of reference and market it as a lifestyle choice rather than a brand – for a generation with unprecedented access to the whole of human thought and culture, we might be frightfully simple to con.
