I somehow escaped having an Instagram account.
This means that I am oblivious to all of my friends’ fun broadcasted on Instagram. I don’t feel pressured either to update the abstract audience of everyone I ever connected with online, on where I am, what I am doing or who I am hanging out with.
I feel very blessed.
Still, Instagram hasn’t completely escaped me. And it bugs me.
My wife and I live a pretty social life. My wife’s job required us to temporarily move to a place far away from home. Luckily the culture of the place we moved to is very friendly to foreigners and there is a big bunch of people like us who are also new to this place and eager to make new friends for the time that they are there.
This makes the lines of our friend circles blurred and our social life very dynamic. To illustrate: old friends leave and new friends arrive with such regularity, that the guest list of a birthday party this year will look vastly different from the one we threw last year.
Over the past few months, it has struck me multiple times how people know more about my life than I tell them or likely hear from others. Like: where we travelled last weekend and with whom. How can they know? Instagram. A post from someone else on that trip about that trip. Of course. You don’t have to be on Instagram, to be on instagram.
It’s not the worst problem to have, I know. It’s great that I participate in happenings that are fun enough for other people to post about. And without social media, people also talk about common friends or friends of friends.
Yet sometimes I am not sure about how I feel about other people hearing about my weekend adventures through social media of other people. Not that there is anything to hide, I just hope the message came across well.
Real life interactions usually offer the possibility to be mindful of sensitivities around a certain subject, as can be the case if the topic of discussion is about who is hanging out with whom. The goal of social interactions (offline), I believe, is often less about what all the talking is about than it is to have the interaction. So surely you will try to avoid hurting the feelings of whom you are talking with.
In the loud bursts of social media self-promotion and personal branding, any such nuance of tone is impossible. The audience is way too diverse to cater to all possible sensitivities. Just think of the unease to post something about a night out with the boys that strikes the right tone to all of: partner, boss and said boys. It becomes even more complicated if you have to count in the social fabric between people featuring in your post and your followers. Yet those relationships are equally real, and have just as much context.
Imagine a friend you were on a weekend trip with. This friend talks with another common friend. This common friend could have equally well been on that weekend trip because you like him or her but, due to circumstances, as is life, you did not invite him. You probably would feel uncomfortable with that first friend talking about that trip as if it was the most awesome trip ever, that everyone had non-stop fun and now everyone who was on that trip are best friends for life.
Yet this is the kind of impression an Instagram post or story typically evokes. It’s probably the content most of the first friends’ followers love to see. Except for maybe the few people who wonder why you didn’t ask them to join the trip.
I am happy not to be on Instagram. I would probably freak out by the pressure to post while worrying about how the same post is interpreted by different people. Yet other people still post about me. And now I worry how common friends, who may have seen those posts, interpret such posts, potentially not entirely positively.
Without an Instagram account, I luckily stay blissfully oblivious to whatever content is going around from which my whereabouts or activities can be deduced. It’s probably a lot less about me than I think anyway. At the same time, not really knowing what other people know, can also be a nagging sense of worry.
Every time I talk with someone who gives me a hint that he or she knows what I was doing last Friday night I get a real eerie feeling. Did this person get to see that picture we took right before dinner? Or did she see a story at the end of the night, one too many drinks later, when I was doing that silly dance that surely someone had filmed?
From when I was in law school, I remember it being challenging to find a simple and encompassing definition of the right to privacy. A definition that has worked for me is “being in control of what other people know about you”.
Given this definition, there are many flagrant privacy violations I am subject to and aware of (yes, internet companies that do large scale gathering of personal data, I am thinking of you). I know that I am not in control of what the online store knows about me when it’s nudging me to buy this or that pair of headphones. But somehow this is easy to shrug off. Not being in control of what your friends know about you, due to social media stories spread by other people, feels more unsettling.
How does one fix or regulate this? Maybe we need some sort of social etiquette where it’s frowned upon to post about social gatherings to any audience beyond who already was at that gathering. Although this arguably defies the purpose of social media altogether.
Meanwhile, I’ll continue feeling blessed, not knowing that my new cool friend threw a birthday party last week to which I was not invited. There’s no social disappointment that will discourage me to further invest in that relationship, improving the chances that I will be celebrating his or her birthday next year.
And what about that new friend who wasn’t on the trip, but may or may not have just scrolled through some flashy posts about it after a tough day at work? Hopefully he forgives me and still wants to join the next trip.