The Internet can be a strange place, but it always felt that the mind-bending obscurity and randomness of the human consciousness was reserved for Tumblr and other meme repositories. It seems, however, that Instagram is no longer immune.
As picked up by The Atlantic and The Guardian recently, there has been a surge in the number of Instagram accounts that are dedicated to posting identical images every single day. Some are dedicated to minor celebrities, while others are focused on gherkins, plungers, or what's particularly popular, a toaster.
If you ever become jaded about what it takes to build a solid following on Instagram, it might be best not to dwell for too long on the fact that a teenager has posted the same picture of a cartoon cow every day for the last year and now has more than 30,000 followers. No, he doesn't use hashtags. He barely uses captions.
The other emergent trend, as reported by Eater New York, is for restaurant chains to publish bizarre, often sexualized imagery that, for the most part, has little or nothing to do with their food, albeit with a healthy dose of absurdity. Images are often an art director's gentle nightmares, bordering on nonsensical, but providing talking points and fodder for sharing. This isn't simply an overt attempt at creating something viral, but strikes me instead as a hipster/corporate mode of tapping into the meme culture that dominates certain corners of the Internet.
Brands' reliance on social media is massive, and having a vast library of content to draw upon is time-consuming and potentially mundane. How many pictures of your restaurant can you post before you run out? Instead, you can unleash the dark mind of a recently graduated art student and give them the creative freedom to produce content where the only brief is "please be weird, and maybe a bit sexy."
Lead image by Sharon McCutcheon via Unsplash.
More evidence that SM is rapidly devolving into a pool of phantasmagoric chaos that mimics the state of nature.
Humanity is getting stupider by the month. I seriously have no faith in our kind. We are doomed.
not my sanity but confirms sadly these days the narcissism is going to be our downfall
Was the downfall for 259 people between 2011 and 2017... https://fstoppers.com/news/scientific-study-shows-selfies-kill-20-times-...
How about posting all RGB values in the right order...https://www.instagram.com/ig_gone_rgb/
He's not doing it right. He only has 8 followers.
Yup. It proves our youth is pretty screwed up, and those of us approaching middle age should be worried about the direction they'll be taking us one day.
Oh FFS.
Everyone needs to introduce their parents and grandparents to Instagram so we can finally put that last nail in the coffin.
You know....I can't argue with this
there is a bigger issue underneath beside the downfall of humanity. The more something get clicked, the more it gets popular and the more it climbs ranking. Google algorithm has a pretty 'common thought' type of logic: the most clicked/viewed is legit, giving that people can understand the difference between wrong and right, especially in case of information. So the more this type of meme / pop culture, which by the way, meme as a word is not even close to identify what internet consider as meme, anyway, the more it spread the more it becomes the silhouette of a bigger meaning, influencing the whole culture. In Italy there is some big shit going on with the new so called 'trap music' where people sign awful pointless lyrics, and people dunno how when what and why, listen to them. Quality wont disappear, but maybe culture will change, and sometimes changes are not an improvement, but a big jump backwards.
If you like the topic of culture shifting, meme etc, check for Zygmunt Bauman, he is pretty good!