graphic by claire evans
I bought my digital camera in fall 2022 during the peak of Y2K nostalgia, a little more than two years after I quit posting on social media. The listing was no more than 15 euros, posted by a family that wanted to clear out their old things. I’ve carried this little silver brick in my purse ever since; a shiny and loud thing, with a little ringtone that goes off every time I turn it on and a definitive shutter sound every time I snap a picture that I can’t turn off.
I started obsessively taking photos of my surroundings when my plans to move abroad became set in stone. I captured mundane tableaus that I had taken for granted: our kitchen countertop piled with the detritus of multiple people cooking at once; the façade of a clothing store reflecting vomit on the sidewalk; the way our ashtray shines under the noonday sun. I didn’t care much for lighting or composition, because I knew that I wasn’t going to post these anyway.
When I first quit social media, I heavily abstained from photography. I proudly announced that my monthly iPhone photo albums steadily shrunk in size by the hundreds, and I chastised those around me who not only took photos of everything, but also posted them. Though I’d like to think that I’m much less pretentious about it now, I have to admit that my adherence to mystery suits me. I’ve come to realize that despite always writing and publishing articles about my life, I’m much more private in person than I am in writing.
Diverging from the mode of memory-sharing that seemingly all my peers subscribe to has given me a sense of freedom to experience life on my own terms: a life that holds solitude as sacred. There’s an undeniable element of performance in maintaining a social media profile. Gen Z primarily moves through image-sharing platforms such as Instagram, BeReal and (for some, still) Snapchat, where the culture of anonymity of the early internet has been shed in favor of presenting an online persona that is supposedly analogous to your ‘real-life’, offline self. Instead of using illustrated avatars as profile pictures to navigate hobbyist forums or reblogging pictures that are of and/or taken by someone else on Tumblr, we decorate our feeds with pictures of our own lives. Places we’ve been, people we’ve met, food that we’ve eaten, ways that we’ve looked.
To use metaphysical terms for a hot second, I can’t help but wonder if people feel the evil eye. People often speak of the nature of surveillance in our social media landscape as relating to the act of data mining for commercial purposes, but I’d argue that in our day-to-day lives, the evil eye from cybersecurity organizations is not as pertinent as the evil eye we are getting from each other.
My worry of surveillance is a worry about the plain act of looking. Or I suppose in this case, of being looked at. The headline screenshot of the 2021 New York Times article “We Should All Know Less About Each Other” has been memed to hell and back, and for good reason. We are living in an unprecedented era of information and in relation to this idea of surveillance, specifically mundane information about each other. If you regularly post about your life on Instagram, your feed becomes a public archive of who you are and who you’ve been. Trips you’ve taken, cafés you frequent, hell, even songs you’ve played — all accessible with the tap of a finger.
This sort of information about each other isn’t new, of course. We used to communicate our cultural affiliations through more physical, usually sartorial means: pins and badges to express political leanings, combat boots to say that we listen to punk music, turtlenecks to say that we went to grad school or read French philosophy. Even without the visual semiotics of identity, people remember things about us. From loved ones to strangers, we’re all remembered for our little quirks and habits: I used to frequent one cinema so much that the woman at the ticket booth knew me by name without me ever introducing myself. When she first said, “You’re Honey, right?” I was so spooked, that I forgot that she probably just saw my email notification for a booking so often that she put two and two together.
But there’s something about the permanence of social media that makes me itch under the collar. If I don’t want to see anyone, I can just stay in my room all day. If I have to go out anyway, I can throw on a ratty old hoodie to make sure no one takes a real look at me. I can choose to be glanced at, but not perceived. It’s this toggle to perception that I want control over. You can perceive me today but not tomorrow! But having photos of your life on social media eradicates this ability to elude the gaze altogether.
Even the word ‘sharing’ feels ill-suited in describing our habits. Sharing evokes feelings of intimacy, like dropping a Spotify link to a song I think a friend would enjoy, or privately sharing a YouTube clip I know my sister would laugh at. To put it more accurately, we broadcast our memories. Even with Instagram’s close friends feature, sharing a story with twenty of your followers instead of two hundred is still twenty pairs of eyes on you. Twenty people in a room, looking at you doing your annual autumn Gilmore Girls marathon whilst munching on cheesy fries or whatever other activity you’ve decided to post that day.
Image-sharing platforms are essentially Gen Z’s primary instrument of memory. The thing that makes me itch isn’t that we are dependent on a tool to help us remember, but that the very same tool makes sure others won’t forget.
In her 2019 New Yorker article “How Social Media Shapes Our Identity”, Nausicaa Renner cites Kate Eichhorn from her book “The End of Forgetting: Growing Up with Social Media” in which the latter refers to the act of forgetting as a “taken-for-granted, built-in resource that all humans possessed.” Renner interprets this as “our right to be forgotten,” rather than “our right to forget.” Building an online persona where everything we post has a sense of permanence — even Instagram stories can be fossilized through profile highlights — can lead us to subconsciously calcifying our identities, which should always be in flux. We are discouraged from reinventing ourselves for the purpose of maintaining our performance.
With constant performance comes performance fatigue. The more frequently we document our lives with the intention of publishing them, a question begs to be asked: do we experience life for the sake of our own growth and enjoyment, or for others to view and consume? With our personal lives hung for show with no expiration date on our feeds, retreating to our rooms or putting on an anonymizing hoodie will no longer protect us from the gaze of the other, as our images are free to access anywhere and anywhen. As forming an identity is also a way of storytelling, this moving chronicle can be disrupted by the pressure to maintain a stable image of ourselves to our audience. Oftentimes this means we’ll treat our feeds as a highlight reel of all the good in our lives, strategically leaving out the bad so that our narratives won’t be jeopardized. If we’re not careful, this growing chasm between our online and offline personas can lead us to feeling watched, like performers on a panoptic stage with no encore dates.
The forecast looks gloomy, but still I didn’t want to come out of this succumbing to what social media theorist Nathan Jurgenson calls “digital austerity.” I didn’t want to become the embodiment of “technology is bad, Thomas Edison was a witch”, so I asked some friends to tell me about their experiences of posting personal photos on image-sharing platforms.
One friend saw its broadcasting nature as convenient, as a way to update people about their life without having to message people one by one. Another saw feed curation as something they can gamify, as something with the potential to be enjoyable rather than uncomfortable with the exposure it brings. Both spoke of taking pleasure in being able to see their personal development through the years summarized in pictures, an experience almost diametrically opposed to the idea that the maintenance of social performance equals the maintenance of a singular, unmoving version of the self.
Though I can reference studies and articles about the negative impacts of the highly public nature of our digital memory culture till my face turns blue, my devotion to pictorial privacy is first and foremost founded on my own issues with trust and access — that I, ironically (or rather not!), am choosing not to disclose due to (you guessed it!) privacy. When I think of having access to memory, in this case the act of looking through photos, there is something about the gaze of the other that contaminates. Not others who were present when the pictures were taken, like people at a party who’ll get the photos via WeTransfer anyway, but others who have nothing to do with the memory at hand.
My idea of memory is highly private, that I must keep it close to me to protect it. But after conversations with friends, I’ve come to realize that there’s also something powerful about public memory. Something beautiful about wanting others to see how happy you’ve been, not to boast or potentially make them realize how unhappy they are, but to share that happiness in a sort of public celebration.
I spoke to a friend who told me that she uses Instagram as a tool to document the way her life has changed for the better since coming out of depression. Instead of seeing it as a stage she is begrudgingly bound to, she sees the platform as a way of celebrating her survival. A way of reminding herself that she came out the other side, that no matter how much she struggles from time to time, her days can never be as bad as before. Instead of developing the pressure to perform, she sees it almost like a promise. Like flinging proof of the impossibility of your existence into the void: look! This is me. Here I am. And that is worth commemorating.