LThis year, I took 658 photos during a four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted them all on Facebook. And while I waited three hours for it to upload, I would open another tab and look at all 500 photos in my second cousin’s friend’s Florida 2009 Facebook album. It would have included 48 shots of the same sunset and 16 photos of sunsets. Chip flavor that I didn’t have at home.
Nowadays, with Instagram being the primary means of photo sharing, that packet of chips ends up on Slide 7 of what my second cousin’s friend calls the garbage dump. Her summer retrospective is cleverly crammed into a merry-go-round of artless images.
An Instagram dump is an ostensibly unedited, low-stakes, impressionistic set of photos posted in a seemingly random order and finished with a chilling caption. Things like “Summer in Dump” and recently Jennifer Lopez. put it down“Oh, it was summer.” But we know deep down that it’s not really a “dump.” This term suggests that we’re just unloading junk from our camera rolls on a whim, and that what we’re actually doing is more complicated. That means spending an entire afternoon narrowing down thousands of photos to just eight to create an authentic “atmosphere.” Photos of friends, buildings, and martini glasses. Some low res memes. And there’s one shot of just our faces (due to the algorithm, of course).
Thanks to a recent update, you can now post not 10 but 20 photos from your trip to Venice. However, the amount is extremely large. If she dutifully posts dump-style summaries of the past four weeks like everyone else on my feed, my second cousin’s friend’s 20 early fall photos will disappear. Life’s events may be happening in Instagram Stories, TikToks, and Tweets, but the Instagram grid is where we all memorialize them.
Millennials, who are most susceptible to the dump trend, have spent a significant amount of their lives creating online visual repositories. We’ve constructed ourselves according to the whims and metaphors of the moment, from the flash-in-the-mirror pose of the 2010s to the duck face of the 2010s. But never before has online visual presentation been so homogenized.
In 2019, dumps, once the domain of art school friends, overtook our feeds, with everyone from high school head cheerleaders to pop stars posting dumps. Haphazard and amateurish aesthetics have now become a shortcut to cultural capital. That’s why some of the biggest names in music are leading public lives after trashing. dua lipa or ariana grande or katy perry Enjoy your own low-res chaos.
This kind of imagery may have once been a true aesthetic subversion. And certainly, taken at face value, they’re an insult to Instagram’s clean, minimalist presentation. That’s why the dump continues. They feel like an antidote to the glossy aesthetic of influencers, an invasion of personality into the empty land of spawn cons. In reality, they are just a means to mask the truth of being playful within a commercial template. We communicate ourselves while bending the rubric of the dump. That’s all the creativity we’ve been given.
Unfortunately, Instagram’s infrastructure encourages this kind of informal formality. Let’s be honest, this algorithm is something everyone says, but no one actually understands, but it’s elusive by design. For quite some time, posts weren’t displayed in chronological order. Instead, algorithm Bury them (whatever that actually is). So we post less often, implicitly knowing that what we upload is less likely to be seen by people. The less you upload, the more valuable your posts are, and the more time you spend on them. The more time we spend on it, the more embarrassing it becomes, so we discount the effort we put into it. That’s a stupid dump cycle.
It was popular a few years ago, meme A message saying “I’m fed up, so I’m free'” started circulating online. A more accurate statement would be, “I’m stuck on Instagram because I’m fed up.” Cringe was to the 2020s what empowerment was to the 2010s. That attitude keeps us informed. Feel free to cringe all you want, but when you post a dump all you’re doing is neatly following the app’s will.
Source: www.theguardian.com
