Last week in my Articles of Interest, I linked to an article about Bailey Richardson, one of the eleven original employees working for Instagram when they were purchased by Facebook for one billion dollars in 2012. The article discusses how Richardson and a few other original employees have now abandoned the popular social media platform by deleting their profiles, citing as their reasons, a move away from the original ethos of artistry, intimacy, discovery and free expression on the platform, giving way to a celebrity-driven marketplace.
BEFORE THE LOCKDOWN, our Instagram feed was filled with fashion influencers in elaborate magazine-like editorials taken in exotic and far-flung locations. Over the past three months however, due to travel restrictions and stay at home guidance, we began seeing an influx of at-home mirror selfies ...
AFTER I LEFT the (traditional) working world for good two years after I began This Is Glamorous, every night, before I went to sleep, I found myself really looking forward to the next morning. That first cup of coffee, reading, working at my desk in my pyjamas. It was, and has been ideal for a long time.
His relationship with social media is a striking manifestation of the worries expressed by the French philosopher Guy Debord, in his classic work The Society of the Spectacle (1967). Social life is shifting from ‘having to appearing – all “having” must now derive its immediate prestige and its ultimate purpose from appearances,’ he claims. ‘At the same time all individual reality has become social.’
Nearly two months ago, on April 26,2022, it was announced that Elon Musk was buying Twitter. Upon hearing the news, we immediately deleted the Belgrave Crescent Twitter account. Of course, the last time we’d tweeted anything there was in 2017 so it wasn’t being used anyway, but we thought it was a good time to finally make it official.
What is a newspaper? Though a few decades ago the answer might have been obvious, it’s no longer so easy to say. Newspapers have long been about more than just news; they appear less and less on paper and, despite their geographically inflected names, aren’t firmly rooted in any particular place. The New York Times is probably the first thing that comes to mind when you think of an old-fashioned extra-extra-hear-all-about-it newspaper, but it’s also the poster child for the medium’s metamorphosis.
Close to 5 million people follow Influencers in the Wild. The popular Instagram account makes fun of the work that goes into having a certain other kind of popular Instagram account: A typical post catches a woman (and usually, her butt) posing for photos in public, often surrounded by people but usually operating in total ignorance or disregard of them. In the comments, viewers—aghast at the goofiness and self-obsession on display—like to say that it’s time for a proverbial asteroid to come and deliver the Earth to its proverbial fiery end.