The New Yorker:

Sharing casual moments from our lives on social media doesn’t seem to make sense the way it used to.

By Kyle Chayka

The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need, or even the responsibility, to make public for anyone online to see. Posting a picture of what you ate on a given morning was something we did during the early years of Twitter and Instagram, and at the time it felt novel: suddenly, you could share the most mundane moments of your life with a crowd of waiting strangers who might just be excited to see them. In a way, the breakfast photo represented the utopian dream of social media: billions of average people could throw fragments of their lives onto the internet with little mediation—their meals, their pets, their shower thoughts—and it would turn into something not only engaging but vital, a dynamic record of reality from the ground level. To post, and to interact with others’ posts, was to participate in a grand project that valorized amateurism, banality, and a sort of content-based meritocracy: anyone and anything could be interesting, and even go viral, if only you posted it the right way.

Lately, though, I’ve found myself missing the breakfast photo and its equivalents online. There don’t seem to be as many people casually sharing random moments from their lives. In fact, doing so doesn’t make much sense anymore, and it’s a little hard to believe it ever did. What do we see on social media now, more than fifteen years since its advent? A sea of influencers and creators aspiring to varying degrees of high-budget polish; headlines announcing the latest horrors of international wars; images, videos, and text generated by artificial intelligence; and unmitigated trolling and attention farming catered to users’ deep-seated fears, and more or less sanctioned by the platforms themselves. The quotidian doesn’t have as much of a place in this landscape. Thus, many people simply aren’t posting as much as they used to. Recently, I watched as a bartender friend of mine in Washington, D.C., where I live, posted a few cheerful selfies to her Instagram Stories on a weekday morning. Later, I noticed they’d disappeared—she had deleted them. “Sometimes with everything going on in the world I get worried I look insensitive posting stuff like that,” she later explained. “I get self-conscious.”

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