True love leaves no traces

In this recent item about current posting practices on Instagram, Kyle Chayka describes how the newly prevalent “photo dumps” tend to be captioned:

Each one seemed to outdo the last in its ostentatious meaninglessness; they were the textual equivalent of a coy shrug, as if to say, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, let alone why you’re looking at it.”

Admittedly, I have that thought about anything I post anywhere. But if I break through that moment of disavowal, I know exactly why I do this: because I can’t get a job and have turned my sputtering thought processes into a failing small business as a stopgap. I have to do this for money, and I hope you’ll subscribe. (Thank you for subscribing!)

Such self-promotion is often deeply embarrassing, so it seems completely understandable that other people who post, particularly those sensitive to attention metrics, would enact a performative embarrassment to disinhibit themselves. It feels shameful to bring something semiprofessional to the increasingly professionalized space of social media, and not everyone has the wherewithal or the hubris or even the desire to self-professionalize, to commodify themselves for an impersonal attention market. If one can’t fully commit to it, then it makes sense to try a stance of plausible deniability.

But what nonprofessional reason is there to post publicly on commercial platforms? No one can be ignorant of how, as Chayka puts it, “social media became more of a broadcast system,” and there are many other ways to interact with friends and family in forums where every contribution is not algorithmically ranked and assigned an advertising value. Chayka suggests that “all social-media posting serves as a proof of life,” but it’s more like proof of availability to a platform’s marketing apparatus, an announcement that one wants to sell one’s social connections and communicative capabilities. (Years ago I argued that selfies were a pure expression of this.)