When’s the last time you posted on Instagram? Perhaps it was to share a selection of delicious food you ate while on holiday, or show people work you recently completed. Maybe you posted a mirror selfie, or an artfully arranged bouquet of flowers on a balcony at dusk. Did it feel exciting or horrible or thrilling or all of the above? One thing it likely didn’t feel, is cool.
This is because there are very few cool Instagram posters left in this world. Recently, I desperately attempted to curb a friend’s nervousness at the prospect of sharing her handle with a man she’d matched with on a dating app. Her fear: being judged for the poor quality and infrequency of her posts. “What if he doesn’t think I’m cool?”
Instagram’s cachet as a marker of cultural relevance and general coolness is – with a few exceptions of course – fading at pace. As it’s become usurped by TikTok, YouTube and Snapchat as the social media apps of choice among young people, Instagram is a more perfunctory platform than ever, often used to share baseline information about events, work and milestones that you can’t be bothered to text your extended circle about. All this has none of the frisson of the early dump era.
Perhaps the only cool way to post on Instagram, then, is to not post at all. “I think coolness rests offline,” says digital strategist and content creator Zara McIntosh. “There’s a status that comes with being unplugged that partly stems from our dependency on digital platforms. So many of us rely on our Instagram presence to connect us to jobs, people, opportunities, all of which stem from being visible among a sea of others. Not needing to rely on that feels cool.”
Indeed, it can sometimes feel like our collective Instagram lives have fused into a homogenous mass; one account virtually indistinguishable from the other, Types of People easily categorised and therefore forgotten among a sea of ads. Enacting coolness offline is surely more effective, and more fun, than contending with any of that.
“I think there is always going to be a way to be cool, no matter the place, no matter the platform,” says Biz Sherbert, a writer and host of the Nymphet Alumni podcast. “I definitely see posts and people that I think are cool. But I don’t think Instagram posts have as much impact as they did five or 10 years ago. I’m sure this is also a product of getting older, but I remember the days when someone like EmRata would post something and it would feel like a small culture shift.”
As those halcyon days have faded, the stakes of what it means to post on Instagram have too. If posting might not mean as much in terms of pop culture (long gone are the days where a celebrity breaking the internet with a record amount of likes resembled anything close to cool), for many of us in the creative industries, as McIntosh points out, our IG profile is a shopfront for potential employers. The way you present yourself, then, is as much a testament of how hireable you are as your work itself. The shrewd Instagram user will lean into this and weave it into their personal posting strategy – but this is first and foremost a business decision. Cool can come later, if at all. It’s a lucky byproduct rather than a priority.
Even carefully curated authenticity doesn’t get us off anymore. Some friends have wiped their Instagram pages altogether. They use the app primarily as a messaging service and for the purpose of stockpiling food, holiday and interior design recommendations they may or may never look at again. Useful, sure. Definitely not cool.
All that being said, Instagram is likely a much less confronting place when used solely to share holiday pictures and fun stuff with friends within the comparably safe confines of a private profile. Instagram, basically, is a much less confronting place when you’re using it like Facebook – the ultimate death of cool, but perhaps a posting sea change we should resign ourselves to and accept with great relief. We’ve seen it all, we’ve seen too much, and no one really cares anymore. The death of the cool post couldn’t have come sooner.
Original article appeared on British Vogue
