One thing: the millennial Facebook album

Am I being cringe on Instagram or am I subscribing to a lifestyle of extravagance and generosity? Or both?

I am old enough to remember the glory days of the millennial Facebook album. If you missed this gorgeous window of time, it was an era of capturing the entirety of your life in an un-curated dump of Facebook photos. An entire night of blurry digital camera shots laid out for all to see with a kind of manic dedication to abundance. Sometimes hundreds of photos, often barely differentiated from each other. I remember once uploading 47 pictures of a street sign glowing in the darkness. Thousands of low res jpegs of people I barely know in unrecognisable places doing ungodly things. 70 photos in a row of a crowd and one blurry Florence, sans machine. I miss it so much.

You could argue that Instagram and its dedication to the hyper-curated aesthetic was a response to the chaotic messiness of the Facebook album - even the “dump” trend on Instagram is only a pale and soulless mimicry. If it was really a dump, it would include a whole bunch of millennials with harsh bangs showing you an ipod or something.

A few years ago, I had a very sincere conversation with someone about whether or not a photo I just took was “grid worthy” - ie, was it worth posting on Instagram, to be ogled at forever. This sent me into a spiral where I began rating my photos, my content, judging them on whether or not they deserved this pride of place. Add on to this the algorithmic punishment of posting too often too soon on Instagram, and you have a constant source of anxiety, that becomes the polar opposite of the Facebook album. From that day on, I lived in constant fear of breaking the rules of Instagram and posting un-gridworthy content.

this is a cute photo

but this is a thumb and a clock?

Recently, I’ve stopped caring about what I post on Instagram. There’s a few reasons for this - I’m no longer plugged into social media trends to know what the current fad is, so I don’t even know what rules I am breaking. I’ve also been doing a lot of promo for my book on Instagram, which already makes me anxious, without the added pressure of rating things as grid-worthy.

I don’t use Facebook anymore - it’s a scary misinformation factory for boomers - but I gotta say I love looking back on my insane albums. I like the fact that they’re un-curated, because my memory of these times is fading fast. If i’d only kept the most beautiful, the most staged photos, would I be able to remember all the little in between moments? There are people in these albums who I don’t remember, who I will probably never see ever again, but who have been captured as they were in this brief moment where our lives rubbed up against each other. There are people who have died, kept youthful for eternity. There is a little clock near a thumb. I love all these things suspended in time on a weird billionaire’s website.

My love for the Facebook album has made me decide to go for the abundance model on Instagram too. I want to look back on my life and know it’s been full of cool stuff and great people. I want to remember the articles I wrote and the cheese I ate with friends and a flipbook of my dog growing older and greyer every year.

But I do archive all the photos of my exes, i’m nostalgic, not masochistic.

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I’ve recently been reading about the newspaper/ magazine booms of New York in the 60s and 70s, because I’m that kind of nerd, and one of the things I was feeling sad about was that I never got to write cute little “slice of life” columns. And then I remembered I have my own publication where I make all the rules and questionable decisions, so ONE THING is gonna be that.

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