When Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger, two IT inventors from California, started a good ten years ago, they actually had something exclusive in mind. Systrom still knew how to develop high-quality analogue photos in the chemical bath. In contrast, iPhone snapshots were of modest quality at the time. On their free online service, users should therefore be given the opportunity to beautify uploaded images afterwards. So that they looked like “real” photos.
In his documentary on Arte, French filmmaker Olivier Lemaire explains how this new app shaped the mobile Internet era. Facebook, on the other hand, with its text-heavy and complex user interface, was still a tool from the desktop computer age.
With its fixation on the image, Instagram is one of the first networks to emerge from the exploitation logic of the smartphone with an integrated camera. Just three months after the start, there were over a million users. The hipster app, which posted artistic street art, quickly caught the interest of celebrities. Justin Bieber’s first selfie was so well received that the number of views paralyzed the servers.
The Kardashian sisters sensed the potential of self-promotion and became the first icons of the new network. In the first year, Instagram had over ten million users. The new photo-sharing app would soon overtake all other social networks. So, in 2012, Mark Zuckerberg made his competitors an offer they couldn’t refuse.
The purchase price of one billion dollars – mind you, for an app that hadn’t made a cent of profit up to that point – caused incredulous amazement. But Zuckerberg’s concept worked. In the course of commercialization, Instagram radically changed fashion, marketing and advertising – and became a money printing machine.
Whether international branded goods company or craftsman around the corner, whether pubescent teenager or football star: the film uses numerous examples to illustrate how every snapshot, every view of everyday life is increasingly narrowed down to the question: is it also suitable for Instagram?
The “Instagramization” of tourism is curious. Travelers jet to exotic locations. Not because it’s nice there. But to recreate a photo that an influencer previously posted from there. This alignment has also taken hold in the culinary field: Anything that has an Instagram look is appetizing. Food-Porn is the name of the seemingly obscene preparation of vegan burgers for the fast-food view of the smartphone screen.
The documentary focuses primarily on a problematic form of self-portrayal. It aims more and more at the uniformization of the external appearance. According to cosmetic surgeon Michael Salzhauer, known as “Dr. Miami,” women are increasingly letting their bodies match an Instagram photo. This tweaking of appearance follows a trend toward increasingly vulgar, soft-porn-esque self-portrayal.
Who is to blame for this sexism? Is it young, white men who program algorithms in such a way that only sexualized images are liked? This theory is not entirely convincing. The film is worth seeing because it shows one thing: the thesis of Horkheimer and Adorno, which was ridiculed for a long time, according to which the culture industry “everything beats with similarity”, was confirmed in a spooky way by Instagram.
