The Old Instagram

I miss the old Instagram. I created my account in October of 2011, when this app was just up and running. It was the buzz amongst our friend groups. We transitioned from the world of MySpace and the weekly updates of top 8s. (For the kids out there, this is how you knew people were beefing.) IG was new, it was exciting. We shared not quite yet crisp photos we took on our iPhone 3s of our meals, sleeping pets, or OOTDs, and slapped the Amaro (I loved this filter because obviously…) filter on it. We shared quotes we loved or resonated with. A #throwbackthursday - We received 3 likes. There was no such thing as a private profile. Yes. Amazing. That was the place.

Fast forward to present day where photos get lost in the shuffle, we may scroll right past them, or they don’t appear in our feeds at all, because they’re lost behind reels where people are putting on a full performance for “influencing”, their art, or business. Our feeds are not tailored to only people we follow anymore. Our attention gets sucked into these videos for minutes at a time. We realize how much time has passed after going down a rabbit hole. Our attention spans are shot.

I long for the old Instagram. A place that didn’t cause mental health issues for our teens, young adults, and even adults. Where it wasn’t a place where people had mis and disinformation fed to them at a rapid rate, where filtered and altered photos became the norm making you feel like you’re not enough because you don’t look like *that* (they don’t even look like that). I long for the Instagram where photos from friends weren’t driven to stories because it felt like feeds were no longer their space. I miss the IG where every photo wasn’t perfectly curated, or we only posted on our feeds when something “big” happened in life. Where we had to create second accounts to share our hobbies because it feels strange to share on our feeds.