A swimming pool. A sunset. Another swimming pool, another sunset. A beach. A view of clouds through an aeroplane window. A pair of new shoes, another pool, another sunset, a child eating spaghetti. Scrolling down Instagram over August has been — depending on how charitable your view of your friends and acquaintances is — a repetitive litany of smug, artless, pasteurised hedonism; or an engrossing, sometimes surreal, wordless poem to the summer.
Feet on a boat rail, feet on a sun lounger. A fig, a sandcastle. A sunset, another sunset, a foot in front of a sunset. The Instagram Rolodex of snaps amounts to more than the sum of its pixels.
August sends my fellow Instagrammers to beaches and pools, fincas and mesas and pensions around Europe and then on into the world. Every hour, images from every continent, every stretch of ocean arrive. Rather than showing the boundless variety of the world, they all look remarkably similar. A sunset is, after all, the one phenomenon that’s pretty much guaranteed to happen everywhere.
A swimming pool is a water-filled hole wherever it is and about as varied and interesting as an international lavatory. And however glorious and entrancing they are to their parents, all children under 12 look as similar as piglets.
Again, depending on your sentiment, these are either pathetic snaps showing the paucity of the middle-class imagination and its stupid vanity or a comforting proof of the often-derided truth that we are more the same than we are different. Ultimately, what we look for in each other is not endless variation but reassuring similarity.
Instagram is the only bit of modern technology that I use with pleasure. All the rest of it— the social networks, the blogs and Twitters — are either creating a culture that doesn’t include or want me, or is one that I don’t want to be included in. They are shouty and seem to be made for folk who can’t remember the last century or have fewer words than they have opinions, overrun by voices who think in tumescent exclamation marks. And frankly, I get quite enough of that at work. Why would I want to do it for pleasure?
Jeremy Clarkson says with dismissive contempt that I like Instagram because it’s Twitter for dyslexics. And he is the Lord Haw-Haw of Twitter. He also has an Instagram account with more than 15,000 followers. He follows just three of them and has posted five pictures, two of which are unflattering ones of me. I leave that without comment.
He’s wrong, of course. What Instagram is really like is Twitter designed by Richard Curtis. Depending on your cynicism quotient, that will either send you rushing for a bucket or reaching for a hand to squeeze. It’s something to do with the nature of photographs as opposed to words. We are drawn to record things that we would hesitate to describe in 140 characters. Raindrops on roses, whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles . . . and sunsets. We take pictures of things we like, not loathe. People we love, not despise. Of the humdrum and the gaudily beautiful. We record the awe of small lives, the great adventure of the personal.
I admit that if that was all there were out there it would be insufferably trite. But it isn’t. Twitter and the internet of blogs and web communities, of instant replies and the endless projection of the minute into the overblown, is a melee of furious people arranging their figures to cast shadow monsters onto an electric wall.
All the bluster about access and the voice of citizens and a global democracy comes to far less than the logorrhoeic sum of its parts. Twitter isn’t an idea or an opinion or a democracy. It’s halitosis. It’s a smell.
Instagram’s unique selling point is that it has created a lyrical moment in your phone without cynicism or sneering irony. In the midst of mercantile hectoring emails, missed calls and the pulses of digital demands that crank up the tension and the anxiety, we also carry a photograph of a friend’s new baby, an unlikely sandwich my editor is eating in Australia, a sunset. It is an antidote, a perspective on the personal and profound.
Now the roll of images is of last swims, final al fresco lunches, bags at airports, blonder, browner piglet children carrying holiday rucksacks, then a menagerie of missed pets; the supremely unemotional cats, dogs, ponies and guinea pigs. Instagram has become a thing we thought we would never need again or miss — the seaside postcard. Thinking of you. Wish you were here.
