One interesting aspect of the pandemic internet is all the content that has stopped appearing anywhere. Max Read writes, “Instagram, cut off from a steady supply of vacations and parties and other covetable experiences, had grown unsettlingly boring, its inhabitants increasingly unkempt and wild-eyed, each one like the sole surviving astronaut from a doomed space-colonization mission.” Instagram—formerly the most straightforward, literal, and aspirational of social networks—has become the lacuna that mirrors our real, enervated social lives, a void to stare into as we mourn everything that COVID-19 has choked off. It’s not just the vacations and parties that aren’t happening, either, but how Instagram (and the broader internet) process the activities that
#138: The Wild Silence
#138: The Wild Silence
#138: The Wild Silence
One interesting aspect of the pandemic internet is all the content that has stopped appearing anywhere. Max Read writes, “Instagram, cut off from a steady supply of vacations and parties and other covetable experiences, had grown unsettlingly boring, its inhabitants increasingly unkempt and wild-eyed, each one like the sole surviving astronaut from a doomed space-colonization mission.” Instagram—formerly the most straightforward, literal, and aspirational of social networks—has become the lacuna that mirrors our real, enervated social lives, a void to stare into as we mourn everything that COVID-19 has choked off. It’s not just the vacations and parties that aren’t happening, either, but how Instagram (and the broader internet) process the activities that