Instagram Photo Dumps Might Save Us All
God, I hope so.
Instagram will continue to remain a millennial playground. Even with the obnoxious renovations and features and fucked-up feeds (just make chronological the default again PLEASE—secondary feed just isn’t cutting it), we maintain some level of interaction and digital living on the platform.
It is certainly a boldly blanket statement to say this of millennials, but hey, it’s catchy and communicates enough of the image I’m painting. Or at least attempting to.
I don’t post nearly as much as I used to—and this is true across all platforms. Which weirdly enough gives me an odd feeling. Should it feel weird not to post? Another thread to pull another time.
There is something I’ve seen that has given me hope and envious FOMO in a new, strange way: photo dumps. Particularly, my friends and internet mutuals sharing their scrapbook round-ups:
“How August went”
“Life lately”
“Take me back to this place”
And one of my recent favorites from a fellow Substack writer and lovingly, chronically online person: “finding new ways to come home 🌀🌊”
Be sure to follow Arbela on IG for these poetic posts of cultivating a personal aesthetic to lift your soul and also subscribe to her Substack .
I feel a ting of the FOMO because I haven’t had photos in my camera roll to cobble together as a digital diary entry. Over the past year or two, I’ve been quietly contemplating the habit I no longer have to take selfies or photos in the moment. It’s like it has slipped my mind until I want a new profile picture or I just have the itch to share.
But these photo dumps—like Arbela’s with bottled moments and emotions and textures, a capsule of her environment, the song she’s playing on repeat, her intention setting with the Universe—are not a performance for anyone else, but a love letter to the self shared with all who come into similar algorithmic orbit.
Fundamentally, I believe photo dumps facilitate a healthier version of internet performance while balancing the desire to document and share the setting and scenes of our lives.
The dramaturgy of the social internet is unavoidable. I won’t mince words, I like the performance, the curation, the crafting of an aesthetic. We all do, and it is narrow fucking minded to pretend we don’t.
Do we like to perform because that is how we’ve been conditioned to behave? Is it an intrinsic desire or an operational function we have been manipulated and conformed into exercising?
Yes, to all of it.
However, this is the world we live in. I believe is it more than possible to find a productive, meaningful, healthy, fulfilling, and at times, purely enjoyable relationship with the technology and digital landscape woven into our lives.
I also believe we have no choice but to do so. At least, I hope so. I hope we can figure out how to live with it all and it not be a compromise or a lesser of other evils type of situation. Certainly not a half-life, but the agile, creative, adaptive, persevering attitude of the human spirit.
Creating photo dumps in place of daily or in-the-moment posting is not a side effect of learning to live with the squeak of the floorboard. These are moments collected and made keepsakes as a diary entry, and they feel further away from the performativity we are accustomed to.
Maybe some folks are only posting their seasonal round-ups because they saw someone else do it. It’s possible the action to create their own is an instinct to practice what the culture has manifested as another ritual. But to create it, regardless of the inception, is to reflect on what photos one has to illustrate something about them right now. Or the mentality shifts focus to seeking opportunities to cultivate the images necessary to fulfill the template.
It fosters the romanticization of self and one’s environment. Stylistically, it follows the trending attitude toward the overall less polished, more “messy” and raw vibe of the culture. It may appear as a performative obligation as a citizen of the social internet, but truly, it is more an act for the self in the exercise.
I know I feel motivated to document again in photographs and screenshots of my favorite main character theme song on rotation. Yes, I feel a type of sadness when I realize some of my most recent photos of an outing to the beach with friends were back in June. But I feel hope for myself in whatever it is I am seeking: a full body image of myself.
Sometimes, the lens of another’s perspective is necessary. How often do we attempt to step in the shoes of the imagined and real “other” who will receive the images and words we broadcast from our little corner of social media?
The photo dump is extremely engaging—not just for the person scrolling through their feed and swiping through someone’s carousel—but for the person composing it.
At least to me, it is a sign of where we are headed: Deciding how we want to live with it all.
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