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— Written by San Choudhury

I don’t find myself going on Instagram half as much as I used to a while back. 

I’m not saying this because I want to show off how much better I am than all those people who do find themselves lingering on the app as a routine part of their lives. “You scroll on Instagram? Well, I live my life offline”. Please, I find this to be a laughable demonstration of some sort of superiority. But I also appreciate that it might be exactly what you thought I was doing as you read my opening sentence. After all, statements of disinterest in the social media platforms of our time are generally uttered as a sign of distinction from the masses of contemporary society, ‘oh you poor thing, just hooked on the algorithm, brain-rotting away.’ 

Over the last year or so, I’ve ended up curating a very particular kind of feed on my Instagram account. What I see today every time I visit the app is a culmination of months of interaction with certain kinds of content. You know my type, I’m sure: I was doing my PhD, I finished my PhD, I spend a lot of my time critically talking about academia and scholarship, I love to see people learning, reading, writing, thinking outside traditional institutional spaces. Given this image of me as a person, you can then also imagine the kind of content that I encounter. More often than not, it always has some sort of an ‘intellectual’ bent to it. 

This has naturally also coincided with the broader cultural moment itself that we’re living in: being intellectual is in. 

There’s always some part of me which doubts when I make grand statements like these because for all I know, it's just the algorithm showing me what I want to see. But come on, major mainstream outlets like Vogue are releasing articles titled ‘Less Internet, More Intellect’; and books have suddenly become the new must-have accessory. It can’t just be algorithmic schizophrenia that I’m experiencing. 

Every damn time I open the app, I see content which is unmistakably intelligent: a hot take, clever contemporary commentaries, intellectual life hacks, people who not only have the ideas but dress the part too. Is it a sense of frustration with this kind of content I’m constantly exposed to? No, absolutely not. It's not at all that I hate seeing what I’m shown because I find it oh so low for me and my refined intellectual habits of mind. It's a feeling that’s entirely different from frustration, distaste, disgust, or even distrust for that matter. 

To articulate to you what I instead feel, I wish to share with you a snapshot of what I see on Instagram.