Perfection, when contrived, is laughable. Instagram is easy to dismiss for the way it flattens and fluffs. I’m happy to put up with accusations of vanity, though, to put something beautiful out there in the ether. Besides, I go for perfection in my posts, fun in my Stories, and that’s my clunky motto. Perhaps because they disappear, the Stories people post tend to be more spontaneous, more silly, and definitely more enthralling than regular videos. There’s a comedian I know a little, and every day I see their little Mexican hairless dog trembling in anticipation of a walk; I watch Chance the Rapper’s baby girl learn to count; and I see what my sister Lilly is making for lunch. Stories are hypnotic, endless tiny glimpses into peoples’ homes and heads. To stitch them all together into one big quilt to wrap myself in would surely answer every question I have about who we are and why we’re here. This is what I’ve been looking for, I think, rapt, as I lie dead-still in my bed, tapping the snooze button on my alarm for the fourth time that morning.
I’m cautious of this addiction, and of this belief that a new piece of technology can allow me into the secret lives of others, because I’ve fallen in love like this before only to see it all fall to pieces. For a brief few weeks during a comedy festival in Melbourne in 2010, I got completely hooked on Chatroulette. Still in its first year, this chat website randomly connected users to each other so they could chat over video. The Russian teenager who created it, Andrey Ternovskiy, named it Chatroulette because of that scene in The Deer Hunter, where prisoners of war are forced to play Russian roulette. That note should probably have signaled how it would all end up, a game of chance with terrible consequences. In this case, while I never blew my head off, I certainly saw many, many headless men masturbating.
But there was a sweet spot just before that happened that lasted at least those few weeks I spent captivated in a Melbourne hotel room, flashing through portals into other worlds. When people who didn’t share a language were connected, we could still smile and wave or conduct impromptu puppet shows. I was randomly connected to a German couple having a dance party with their friends, a teenager in Florida who wanted to talk about legal drinking ages, and an architect in Israel who carried his laptop outside to his veranda so we could see the sunset together. It felt like a real human connection, albeit through code.
Soon enough, though, the curious ones, us chatty ones interested in connecting, we were outnumbered. Click after click became dick after dick. Like most of the Internet, Chatroulette soon got overwhelmed by all the dicks, and women, who were less likely to venture on there in the first place, almost completely stopped visiting. Instagram feels much safer, although of course there’s a price to pay for that, with their standards that ban female nipples and their ever-increasing number of advertisers barreling through my feed. For now, Instagram and Stories have restored for me a place to join in, to span time and geography and connect with others as we all express ourselves in whichever way we see fit, as long as we don’t show our nipples.
Before I left, my therapist asked me how I planned to deal with all the feelings a trip to Ireland evokes in me. A visit home typically presents me with a real smorgasbord of emotions. I feel guilt for leaving, regret at old failures there, joy at being in a place so familiar, and love for my people and my misty little country. These feelings generally mix in together to create some kind of phantasm that blurs up on me and swallows me whole at the arrivals gate in Dublin Airport. I answered my therapist immediately. “Ummm, maybe I will just stack those feelings up and organize them when I’m back?” We smiled and bowed at each other slightly, as we always do when I make some kind of corny joke to buy time, and I sighed. “I suppose I’ll steer clear of alcohol and I’ll write down my feelings and express myself the best I can in the moment I’m feeling something.” Expressing my feelings in the moment as best I could? I didn’t know it then, but Instagram helped me to do just that.
I walked through the streets of Dublin, feeling like a weird ghost myself, because me and those streets, we know each other well, but I’m not there anymore. I lived there, in five different homes, for twelve years. Now I don’t have a home there. The redbrick buildings on South Great Georges Street are still standing; the unchanged smell of peeled eggs and coffee wafts out of Simon’s Place, where I used to sit with my first boyfriend; the national broadcaster still plays the Angelus bells at midday; and the same man with bright blue eyes sits begging on Wicklow Street. There should be a word for what feels like déjà vu but for when you actually have experienced the situation before. Memory isn’t the right one. Memories are what I have when I’m away. There is something physical that happens, something more than a memory that crowds in when I’m back there again. I try to document it. I capture the sound of the church bells, the metallic blue of the River Liffey, and the steam from the hot cup of tea I pour on my first morning back, and I put them all on my Instagram Story. I’m saying, Can you see this? All of this is still here, and now I am back here too.
The best functions of this feature are the ones that are missing. There are no likes and no shares—the usual call-and-response reward system that goes with most forms of social media is gone. When I use Stories, I feel less like those laboratory rats who keep pressing a button for more cocaine. Which is nice. I wonder how much longer the feature will last; it’s existed since August 2016 and has grown to over 250 million users in a year. It is increasingly filling up with advertisements that snap me out of my reverie as I watch other peoples’ Stories, causing me to huffily close the app altogether.
Of course, I open it again soon after. I scroll through my friends’ Stories back in New York. There was a double rainbow in Williamsburg and most of them captured it. I love to think of them all taking a second to look up and do that. The guy I’d just started dating had a Story up: pretty standard fare of trees swaying and his cat looking pissed off with a cone around her neck. He must have gotten her spayed, praise be. For a second I’m back on his bed, listening as he explains, haltingly, that she gets so horny, and loud about it, he has to rock her hips to “calm her down.” And in that second I’m horrified and impressed all over again at this man who loves his cat so much he’ll help her masturbate. I wonder idly if he bothers to check who has watched his Story. I often check, although when over a thousand people have, it’s hard to keep track. The ability to see a list of names of people who have watched your stories is an intriguing feature. It is very satisfying for the imaginative among us—I know that my busy little brain whirs to make sense of it all. Why is he watching, is she showing someone else, what will they all think of me now? Sometimes, before I post, I need to stop and check: Are these thirst traps? Some photos, some videos, am I hoping they will set in motion some kind of tryst, like perhaps I’m “tryna fuck,” as my young friends would say? Yes, sometimes, but mostly this is bigger than some low-level neediness. I am sending these out to the world, anyone, anyone, anyone there? These images are me trying to say, to anyone who cares to look, this is what it’s like, this is who I am.
I do my work in Dublin, performing at a comedy festival and doing radio interviews to promote the shows. The conversations I have, both on and off stage, are easy and feel natural on all sides. I find I can say less in Ireland and express more; the fluency I’m missing when I’m away comes straight back into my mouth, and it’s a joy. I begin taping snippets of conversations, with taxi drivers and waitresses and comedians, and putting them on Stories. I’m sitting with old friends drinking wine after a show and I realize how much I miss them. I begin to miss them again even though they’re right here right now, talking to me. I whip out my phone and make a quick Story, and the sad spell is broken. I have reset the tone. Somehow, by leaving the moment, I’ve jolted myself back into the moment.
In physics, the observer effect is the fact that observing, or measuring, a situation or phenomenon necessarily changes that phenomenon. Light itself is powerful enough to alter what is going on. Say, for example, that phenomenon is a tabl
e full of friends who live far away from each other. This observer effect is caused by an instrument used to observe or measure that table full of friends, thereby transforming the state of that table of friends. The instrument in this case was my smartphone, halting proceedings for a few seconds, capturing and sending our likenesses out into the world. The observer effect is a result of the measurement process because the tools we use to measure are cumbersome on a quantum level, and I wonder if my friends would be unaffected if they didn’t see the camera or hear me bellow at them to strike a pose. Or maybe in this case the observing process is some proof of quantum entanglement, that the photons zipping around between people and phones are all jumbled up together. Is my phone a part of me, and vice versa?
Whatever the science, I sense that depicting reality gives me a break from reality. After Dublin, I go back to my hometown of Cobh. Walking into the kitchen in my family home from the clear cool air outside is an intense experience for the senses. There are fifteen voices all speaking at once, telling each other where to sit and what to eat, the smells from the stove of a huge pot of curry, and, of course, a huge pot of new potatoes, the steam from which fogs up the windows. I step carefully over a baby staring up at me from an unexpected spot on the floor to get to my chair, which my father has just placed beside his.
This scene in the kitchen impacts more than my senses, of course; it goes into and among whatever it is behind the senses and throughout them, the extra perceptions every individual feels. In my case, at that lunch, it was delight at the prospect of this gathering and also some nervousness, some small anxiety I couldn’t name. To manage it, to lessen the impact, I would record it, just for ten seconds, a short sip of oxygen before I went back under. In that case, my phone certainly pulled me out of the moment, but sometimes I need that or I go too far in and get lost.
On my father’s birthday, he’s helping to set up a bouncy castle for the grandchildren. He struggles under the weight of the pump, as I stand close by, empty-handed except for my phone, trying to get a Boomerang of him staggering. I wander off, and get annoyed at my parents’ little wire-haired Jack Russell, Lacey, for not doing her tricks in the order I want them for my story, so I’m saving the content and rearranging it. “Paw then dead, Lacey, paw then dead.” Lacey is confused and tired. I’m treating her like Hitchcock treated his blondes.
Meanwhile, my mother, whom I miss like crazy when I’m five thousand miles away, calls my name and I’m annoyed that she has disturbed me. She is in the kitchen trying to make potato salad for the twenty people coming for lunch. She asks me in to help with the peeling and I shout back, “I’ll be there in a second, I’m just finishing a work email.” I’m ignoring my own mother, who asks for so little, so I can have more time to watch Lizzo and her band of plus-sized babes shake their butts on a tour bus. I get such a kick out of Lizzo’s Stories! Ten minutes pass in a heartbeat, and the potatoes are peeled by the time I look up.
I could watch other people’s Stories all day long. Perhaps because they disappear, people are less guarded in their Instagram Stories. They film themselves on the toilet, in their beds, cooking dinner. Not all at the same time, of course. I love this peeping, because I’m nosy and it’s usually really difficult to see inside peoples’ homes unless you befriend them, or sleep with them, or have children who visit them so that when you collect those children you can strain your neck on their porch, trying to see what type of chairs they have. I snoop happily, globally. I check in on a jazz musician I met once, he’s having a lovely time hiking in Oregon. I see my sister is getting coffee with her old boss, and wonder why that is. SZA posts a photo of someone’s tattooed hand on her shoulder, whose is it? While I take all these little trips into other peoples’ worlds, my body lies inert, slumped on an office chair in a hot little room. Sometimes the app keeps an image of my unaware face that flashes up, and when I log back in I see a digital Turin shroud, somehow both slack-jawed and anxious.
As well as poking around in other peoples’ lives, I have this busy little mind that is preoccupied with reaching out, explaining, and tweaking whatever I see before me. I am intent on communicating my experience. I make my own Story, chatting into the camera, resisting the urge to watch it back, trying very hard and very consciously to be unselfconscious. I have always felt a longing to be heard and seen and understood. If I was a cavewoman I’d certainly be the one back in the cave during the elk hunts, with a worried face, frantically using bison blood and blueberries on the walls to explain how I didn’t like loud chewing sounds and I love music and I don’t think I want children because you should only have them if you really want them and I just don’t feel that strongly about it but all the same I’d like you to know that. This impulse to share, possibly to overshare, is easy to scoff at. Add to that how the will to communicate online so often gets mixed up in the aesthetics, with Instagram so full of images, photos, and videos, and I can understand why it is much-derided, and even how it’s accused of being an empty vessel with a pretty exterior.
It’s easy to dismiss Instagram as trifling and trite, but I see this small way of communicating as potentially very powerful. The twin Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft launched in 1977. They are small crafts, just the size of a car. Today, Voyager 1, the faster of the two, is 11.7 billion miles away from us, the farthest from Earth of any man-made object ever. In 2012, Voyager 1 left the heliosphere and entered interstellar space, which is where Sandra Bullock went in the movie Interstellar; it has never been visited by a person in real life, and remains the kingdom of the stars. Both spaceships have sent brand-new information back to Earth via radio waves, revealing that the moons orbiting Jupiter are worlds in their own right, and showing us how Saturn’s rings have intricate weaves, and Earth is just a pale blue dot in the hugeness of the cosmos.
I love to think of those little spaceships going about their business, hurtling through space, because they’re not just reporting back to us, they also have a message to share. Each craft carries a copy of the “Golden Record”—an actual phonograph record full of the sounds and sights of Earth. There are taped greetings in fifty-five languages, an hour and a half of music from all around the world, and 115 analog-encoded photographs showing a selection of just what it is we get up to down here. Etched on the cover there’s a diagram with instructions on how to play the record and see the images and an inscription that says “To the makers of music—all worlds, all times” hand-etched on its surface. The thinking was, I suppose, that if any alien is clever enough to catch the spacecraft, it would be well able to decipher the record too. The record is a time capsule, the best we could come up with to introduce ourselves, to say, “Hello, this is what you should know about us.” More specifically, a woman speaking the Chinese dialect of Amoy says, “Friends of space, how are you all? Have you eaten yet? Come visit us if you have time.”
Between you and me, and I may sound like some kind of drunk empress here, but I have much more grandiose hopes for my Instagram feed than a mere thirst trap, or some public way to demonstrate status. On a good day, this is how I see it. If the Internet is space, then my iPhone is Voyager 1 and Instagram is my Golden Record. Coincidentally, the entire computing power that has navigated Voyager 1 over its 11.7-billion-mile journey from Earth can now be found inside an iPhone. I’ve got the same capability as Voyager 1 in the room next to me right now. It’s off, because I can’t write when it’s on, because I get too distracted by social media and the time slips away, so I dole it out in parcels between writing time. President Jimmy Carter said of the Golden Record, “This is a present from a small, distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts, and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours.” And, you see, I am a small, distant world too, and my Instagram is a token of my sounds, my science, my images, my music, my thoughts, and my feelings. I am attempting to survive my time so I may live into yours.
The greatest scientific and
creative minds in the U.S., led by Carl Sagan, were at work on the record long before I was even born. These great minds did not scoff at the task. They understood the importance of communicating what they were about, they tried to encapsulate their world as succinctly and elegantly as possible. Images on the Golden Record include photos of traffic jams in Thailand, construction sites in Africa (the country in Africa is not specified), a violin beside a music score, the parameters of the solar system, a nursing mother, an airplane in flight, and a page from Newton’s System of the World, where that particular genius details the means of launching an object into orbit for the very first time.
Creating and curating an Instagram account can feel a little stupid. I sometimes wonder if I should be doing something in real life instead of online, and if this whole thing is a fool’s errand. After all, is anyone even looking, and if they are, do they care? The team who made the Golden Record understood how tiny the chances were of any other life-form finding the craft, and then the record, and knowing how to decipher what they found there, and finally, understanding the message. That did not put the team off; they threw themselves into the effort, curating a collection of sounds, from a kiss to a night chant by Navajos to the brain waves of a woman in love.
That woman’s name is Ann Druyan, and she was the creative director of the Golden Record. It was her idea to measure the electrical impulses of a human brain and nervous system, turn it into sound, and put it on the record. Smithsonian magazine reported on how this came to be, drawing from Murmurs of Earth, the book about the Golden Record. In an hour-long session hooked to an EEG at New York University Medical Center, Druyan meditated on a series of prepared thoughts. In Murmurs of Earth she admits that “a couple of irrepressible facts of my own life” slipped in. She and Carl Sagan had gotten engaged just days before, so a love story may very well be documented in her neurological signs. Compressed into a minute-long segment, the brain waves sound, writes Druyan, like a “string of exploding firecrackers.” Thousands of years from now, as the spacecraft continue to spin through the cosmos, an alien civilization may find and decipher that data, turning it back into thoughts. They will read her mind, and know how she felt on that day long ago on a planet far away.
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