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My client today was talking about having visited his daughter who is living up in the laplands of Finland, and then showed me her Instagram account which was filled with some really great photography from her hiking and skiing trips. While I am not a fan of Instagram per se for various reasons, if there is a positive to come out of Instagrammable living, it is that many will have to leave the house to do it. 

Like this early thirties girl, many people are trying to replicate the grand scenes that they consume, the mountain top images, the serene calm lake and walking through wide open fields and to do so, they have to actually go to these places, sit on mountains, wait for the lake to be calm and get their shoes dirty. 

https://i.imgur.com/Uk8RsJX.jpg

While these platforms were meant to be social media, they really aren't that at all and are all about self-promotion and reputation building. The interesting thing is that there is actually very little variation across similar accounts and very quickly, they all look the same. However, what is good is that at least some of these people might have got out and had experiences they wouldn't have had otherwise.

If however people were really going to be their *lives on the online,* we can already assume that there is much less grand, much less brightly colored food consumed and a great deal less glamour. I wonder if there are Instagram accounts filled with people playing their X-box. Is there a perfect "controller pose" that gets the angle just right to really show off the thumbs?

Imagine you are single and get invited to home-cooked dinner by a potential partner, to which you agree. You knock at the door, they answer and you enter into their home for the first time. As you step in and they politely take your coat, you look around and see that the walls have lots of photos and then notice, they are all of them. Selfies on their walls, in the hall, the lounge, the bedroom (not that you would likely venture that far). What would you surmise if someone only had selfies on their own walls? Would you consider it strange and are they still partner material?

There are Instagram accounts much like this, with picture after picture of themselves as far as a thumb can scroll. while that might imply something about the account owner, what does it say about the consumers of such content? Where is that value and, what does it inspire?

I see valuable content as something that inspires some kind of action, whether it be the catalyst for new thoughts or the push for real world action. Of course, this can be in the negative or positive depending on perspective, but my point is that if what you consume doesn't inspire you to do something, why are you consuming it?

This doesn't have to be a direct 1:1 engagement, but if we look at Steem as an example, there is content that drives transactions of different kinds through the system. Some might be a post that gets replies, creates discussion, makes people think, maybe add further posts, and perhaps even adjust their actions. There is content like Splinterlands that inspires people to play, trade cards, battle and post and talk about it. There is content that provides information that inspires changes like altering a diet, exercising more, taking up a new hobby or investing into a business.

There are many ways content can inspire people but at the end of the day, movement is required and this means some kind of transfer, a transaction, a line between point A and B, even if not obvious. 

Now, from a social media perspective a transaction could be a like, a share or a knock on post which has value for the platform, but what is the value for the consumer? Which is more valuable, to thumb through liking selfies or being inspired to change behaviors? If you look at it from an economic consumption frame, the person who goes on that holiday to a beautiful location on a golden beach for their Instagram moment is going to spend a lot more than the person who double taps a thousand selfies. But, they will also have opened themselves up to experience.

One of the worst things I see in the way social media is engineered is that it takes randomness out of the equations and pushes tailored content that doesn't challenge into easy reach. The low-hanging fruit that builds the click-based model of monetization favors a lowering of cognitive friction and increases the chance of content acceptance. This means that there is a reduction in content range consumed by an individual, even if the availability and diversity of content has increased massively. 

While selfies have replaced cat videos on the internet, there is a massive amount of consumable information that can be potentially *life changing* that passes by unseen. A person who has 1000 same-angled selfies will garner more support than a person who has some long form content that helps people gain economic freedom. the reason is that the barrier to entry is so low for the selfie account that anyone can enter, but change content is always met with resistance. 

As said, the algorithms favor the low-barrier and mass consumable because it generates those double taps and shares as anyone can accept it and the algorithms push this far and wide. What it will not often drive is the content that will evoke real change in people, because real change will come with fewer clicks, and their model is to capture transactions through clickbait, even if it is not in the best interest of the user. 

Of course, the rebuttal will be that the platforms didn't force anyone to use them which is increasingly untrue and that the *other content* is still available, which is again increasingly untrue. At the end of the day though and regardless of the semantics used for justification, what we consume is up to us as individuals and up to us as parents in regards to our children. 

Perhaps we should consider what we consume and classify it into two main categories by asking ourselves; 

Is this a stroll through the inspiring, or a scroll through the meaningless? 

For each of the answer may differ on what inspires and what is without meaning, but the attention paid to the connection of content to our own lives can probably shift our focus onto something that matters to us, not them.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]

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