Today I drastically reduced my ‘follower’ count and the amount of folk I follow on Instagram. (If that’s you, I’m sorry. It’s nothing personal.) It’s the beginning of me paring back my presence there in the hope that I can eventually cut it out altogether. It’s a distraction and a stress and, at times, annoyingly full of ads for products I really don’t care about.
The experts were right: social media users are ‘the product’. It’s the information we hand over that’s sold to advertiser’s so they can sell us crap we don’t need. It’s known as the ‘surveillance economy’. And what do we get out of this transaction? The privilege of Meta (and others) storing our images and personal information to feed an algorithm to sell to more advertisers. Thanks but no thanks. For a few ‘likes’ per image I’ll show my work on my website and other places (where exactly I’m not sure). I can’t see who’s looking but if you are there’s no advertising here or some bot deciding the order of the images they’ll see.
Happy non-commercial viewing!
