Guy Debord used "images" as a metaphor but with Instagram it's not even a metaphor anymore.
> The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.
> The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living human being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role.
Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society unfettered .... They embody the inaccessible result of social labor by dramatizing its by-products magically projected above it as its goal: power and vacations, decision and consumption.
> Where the real world changes into simple images, the simple images become real beings and effective motivations of hypnotic behavior. The spectacle [...] naturally finds vision to be the privileged human sense which the sense of touch was for other epochs; the most abstract, the most mystifiable sense corresponds to the generalized abstraction of present-day society. It is the opposite of dialogue.
Same with Instagram. I don't use it but I concede that it is useful to some people as a platform for promoting businesses.
FB on the other hand, deserves to die in a fire.
I've all but dropped off Facebook but made an Instagram account earlier this year and am enjoying it. The photo-centric nature seems to eliminate 99% of the toxicity of Facebook. I've subscribed to the accounts of friends, architecture/design centers, Archillect, and accounts that post pictures of owls and otters. None of this promotes deep thinking or meaningful discussion, but it's a nice five-minute addition to my day. Plus it gives me a place to post my own photography where friends and others will see it.
That said, I'm hardly a Facebook/Zuckerberg fan and will jump ship the moment another platform becomes viable.
IG is the same IMO. You won't see the blatant bigotry and politics, but you will see a monoculture of self-promoters and brand builders which are similarly exhausting, just in a different way.
And I say this as someone who is subscribed to some niche meme pages on IG and enjoy them. It's just that if the page were to disappear tomorrow, I would have forgotten about it within a week. It wouldn't be missed. The value it gives me is very limited. I'd wager it's the same for a lot of other people. Social media's value is geared towards advertisers, not users.
