Instagram's finger prints are all over my life
Should I want to wipe them away?
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The other day I walked into our living room at a time when the light was hitting the wall just-so, and recoiled in disgust. I can only think I’ve not recently walked through that door, at that time, in this season because how else could I have missed the grimy waist-high cloud smudged across the paintwork?
‘What happened to the wall?’ I asked my husband.
‘Kids.’ He said darkly, his tone implying what went unsaid: this is why we can’t have nice things.
We moved into our house six years ago, decorated that room soon afterwards, and haven’t repainted it since. As I examined the smears more closely, I noticed how low they started, where the greatest concentration sat, and how far up the wall they extended. It dawned on me that what I was looking at was the passage of time.
The wall tells the story of how small my son was when we moved in, how tall my daughter is now; how they still run through the house, fingers skimming the paint; the times they sprint and catch themselves palm-flat before bounding across the floor to land on the settee. It speaks of ball games in the garden and charcoal sticks at the kitchen table, of chocolate biscuits and melted ice cream, fingers licked but not washed.
It’s gross and it’s beautiful.
This sense of something being two things at once is familiar to me, as I’m sure it is to you. In early motherhood, the word ‘and’ went from being a second-class conjunction to a pillar of my understanding of maternal ambivalence. I learned I could simultaneously be intensely in love with, and thankful for, my children, AND wish they would stop touching me.
The contradiction could stand; one reality did not cancel out the other.
It was a transformative concept.
And where did I learn this?
On Instagram.
Instagram’s finger prints
A bit like my kids and that living room wall, Instagram’s finger prints are all over my life.
The books I read, the meal I’m cooking for my family this evening, my understanding of feminism, racism, politics, capitalism, environmentalism, my work, my friendships, my writing life, all bear the marks of Instagram to greater or lesser degree. There’s not much in my life that hasn’t been influenced in some way by time spent on this app.
Noticing and admitting that makes me feel a bit like when I first saw the smudges on the living room wall: a bit sick, like I’ve accumulated a layer of grime without meaning to, and - worse - without even noticing.
Even as I write about the undue influence an app has leveraged over my life I’m worried about what this says about me.
Does it say I lack imagination or curiosity? Am I an intellectual and creative sheep, following the crowd?
Does this speak to my curiosity, how I enjoy and collect new information and language that I squirrel away before linking it to other learning, books, tv, podcasts, and film consumed off line, developing my ecosystem of understanding of how the world works?
Am I just another busy mum, who has found an easy and effective way to access information that is useful, interesting and meaningful to me?
Am I experiencing the social media ‘flattening’ of culture Kyle Chayka writes about in his book, Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture?
Or am I all of the above?
This realisation, more than any other, has made me want to delete the app from my phone - the survival of my business, be damned! - but having learned that my knee-jerk response to most things is more often about fear than reason, I paused and thought about it a bit more.
My relationship with Instagram is complicated. I’m no evangelical - I’m well-versed in the harm social media can do - has done - to individuals, communities, and political systems. But Instagram is also my business, in my opinion it’s still one of the best ways for writers to reach readers, and not only have I seen businesses and writers achieve their goals using Instagram, it’s also been a positive force in my own life.
‘Maternal ambivalence’ isn’t the only thing I’ve learned via Instagram. It’s just one example of how the app has facilitated the gifting of language to describe my experiences, that in turn lifted the deep shame I was feeling, and gave me a sense of community.
It’s a fingerprint on the surfaces of my life that I would not want to be without, and there are more…
Instagram gave me permission to think I could be a writer.
There are outliers in every field, who dream up an ambition out of no where and pursue it no matter what, but many people follow a similar route to mine into their line of work.
As children we look around ourselves to see what the options are and, unless someone suggests otherwise, those are the examples we follow. When you don’t have a model for how to live a creative life, and no one presents it as a possibility, it might never occur to you to question the idea that ‘people like us don’t do things like that’. It certainly never occurred to me.
But, in the years after I joined Instagram in 2016, I ‘met’ people who were writers and authors who actually didn’t seem that different to me. My husband’s always had a mantra of, if they can do it, why shouldn’t I? and thanks to what I saw on Instagram I started to actually believe it.
Instagram is where I began my feminist education.
I half-joke that motherhood radicalised me because until I became a mother my understanding of gender inequality was limited to what I considered to be individual episodes of stupid men doing stupid things.
Being groped in nightclubs, dumbing myself down in front of male bosses, and lewd gestures in the street were so normalised that I either didn’t notice them or I shrugged them off as the legitimate price of being a woman moving through the world.
I was shamefully unsympathetic to the mothers of young children who were in my team at work, and to be honest I was a massive dick who, I suspect, deserved to have my judgements come back to bite me. And oh my god did they bite me. I won’t bore you with the details but suffice to say birth trauma, post-natal mental illness, and all the ins and outs of returning to work after having babies, led to my first explicit experiences of structural, systemic prejudice and discrimination and it. rocked. my .world.
In the midst of a rage that threatened to consume me, Instagram laid breadcrumbs that guided me towards the language to articulate what I was experiencing and feeling; it introduced me to a community of other women just as angry as I was; it provided the space to voice my own grievances and a pathway to further reading and deeper understanding.
Instagram is where I began my anti-racism un-learning.
My children are brown and around the time I joined Instagram in 2015-16 some of our experiences as a family meant I was already questioning my understanding of racism.
Around the time my daughter started to ask me when she was going to grow ‘lellow [sic] hair down my back’ I read Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s novel, ‘Americanah’ which explores an inter-racial relationship, the construct of race itself, and challenges white beauty standards. Combined with the questions my three year old was starting to ask, it kicked off an urgent search for more information and insights and, while stumbling around the internet, I chanced across Reni Eddo-Lodge’s essay ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’ that became her 2017 book of the same title.
The limitations of my immature, superficial understanding of racism were beginning to become clear and I was hungry for a deeper understanding of what it was that I could smell in the air, could feel in the way my skin sometimes tightened around my bones in the middle of a conversation, but that I could rarely name. If I was even going to try to mother my children the way they needed to be mothered I needed to un/learn - but how? Again, it was accounts on Instagram that held my hand, introduced me to new language and concepts, and signposted me towards further learning through books and conversation.
Instagram gave me space to explore and express ideas.
I’ve always had more opinions than I can reasonably expect people to listen to, and Instagram gave me somewhere to put them. I could write 2000 characters about my experiences of being a mother without having to obey any rules of polite conversation 🙃. has mused whether writing is a form of neurodivergent info-dumping. I think she might be onto something.
Instagram gave me a space to build relationships at my own pace, on my own terms.
In most of the discourse around how real life is being affected by online behaviours, in-person interactions are largely assumed to be superior to those that take place online, with the latter often characterised as superficial at best, and abusive screaming at worst. What this fails to consider, however, is how face-to-face interactions, while valuable, are also often inaccessible, difficult or exhausting for many people.
When I started using Instagram in 2015-16 I quickly found myself enjoying online communication thanks to the built-in delays that allowed me time to process information and different points of view; its clear parameters for turn-taking; the space to intentionally shape responses so there’s less danger of being misunderstood; and the option to walk away from the conversation, no explanation needed. This has been transformative for me as it has facilitated deep, long-lasting friendships with people from different backgrounds who I might otherwise never have met.
Perhaps it is possible that what I initially worried was a hallmark of a lack of independence, is in fact a sign of inter-dependence, of community and mutual influence.
Fingerprints are sometimes ugly - just as influence from anywhere can be - and there may be places where they can do more harm than we’re willing to tolerate.
I’m reminded of how I’ve worn denim and cotton clothes most of the time for over a decade because I can’t ever be relaxed about the prospect of hand washing or dry cleaning, which in turn makes me think about the ways I also hold boundaries around my use of Instagram and have developed a clear philosophy to make sure its finger prints do not damage anything I hold dear.
Because, alongside the disinformation, hate speech, trolling, lying, bigotry, rampant consumerism, superficiality, judgement, and cruelty that we rightly condemn, for the last 8 years Instagram's fingers have also been sticky with support, solidarity, connection, and community, and I don’t want to wipe any of that away.
If you’re interested in finding out more about my philosophy for Instagram you might like to read these two articles:
If you’re interested in learning more about the ways I teach Instagram to writers, you can subscribe for the occasional article like this one; or become a paid subscriber to join my Too Much Instagram membership. You can find out more here.
IG really is a love it or leave it kinda place. I have both a personal and profesh account. I'm rarely on the profesh one because I see myself phasing out the side biz I have; the pressure to post interesting stuff was becoming a chore. And I'm rarely on my personal one even though I used to post on there a lot. But I have to say that I love discovering new things and new people to follow. Some of the stuff I've bought has been due to the ads I see on there. LOL
Really enjoyed this not just because you’re a great writer but because it’s how I feel about it too. My world has expanded, my knowledge increased and man oh man the friends I’ve made that have moved offline too. I’m glad of those sticky little fingerprints…most of the time.