For the 'gram

I got an Instagram account somewhere in the 2010s, as a way to communicate with fellow owners of silver miniature poodles. Mostly they lived in Japan, but some were also in Finland. A handful also in Sweden, Korea, Canada, the United States. I was also very into Japanese cooking at the time (and, very fleetingly, into teaching myself Japanese), a joint interest of sorts due to Cooking With Dog fandom.

Basically, as I learned from a 2014 Into the Gloss post, there’s a whole corner of Instagram that’s Japanese poodles and Japanese home cooking and as far as I was concerned, that was Instagram.

But in discourse and irl conversation, everyone would use “Instagram” as shorthand for insecurity-inspiring social media. If you go on “Instagram” you feel poor and ugly, as it’s filled with perma-vacationing cellulite-lackers. I’d be confused because while I’m as capable of the relevant insecurities as the next person, I knew it as the site with poodles that looked identical to my own, despite radically different settings. I knew which poodles had celebrated improbable milestone birthdays (25 or some such) and which had passed on. I knew that baked sweet potato would be of interest to a poodle, despite not being a kind of meat.

But the part of the site where beautiful people were enjoying themselves on exclusive beaches, I just had to assume this was there as well. The occasional envy-search of another writer would lead me to a decade’s worth of grid posts where they were looking super duper chill with their friends all of whom also write for T Magazine despite being 12 years old (as in 3-4 years younger than I am) but I was not following these writers, I was not inundated upon logging in. And even those were not the thing meant by Instagram-induced insecurity. These were still dweebs like me, just marginally more popular and successful ones.

Then a couple things happened that changed my Instagram usage. First was, I had kids, the other, the sad thing that happens with pets. A public poodle account because a locked kid-account whose followers were almost exclusively the past-and-current owners of miniature silver poodles. Given how I’d been using Instagram I’d never really linked it up to my social or professional networks, as I had with Facebook (when I still used it for more than Marketplace) and Twitter. Instagram had like 5 relatives 3 friends and all these poodles. I used it as photo backup, effectively.

Then I decided to have an Instagram for book publicity and general normal-Instagram purposes. I got one! And..

…I’m not sure what I’m doing with it, is the thing. Starting a new social media account from scratch is always a bit awkward, all the more so when it’s one I’m not quite sure what to do with, as a poster or a follower. I started it maybe halfway through thus-far book publicity so I missed the moment to boost much that was of that variety. I also still think of Instagram as private and disconnected from the rest of my work life and even most of my social life, so if I take a funny photo or a pretty one or really whatever sort—something I do plenty of!—I never think to put it there.

And then who to follow? At first this went great and I found some good follows, many who’d have made no sense in my other account. Then it sort of stalled out. The recommends have been random and not very useful in pointing me to the accounts of those I follow elsewhere, very possibly because everyone else is also using a locked account as I had been (and still also have!), so I quickly ran out of ideas on that front. I tried following some organizations and publications and wound up inundated with bookstore content where I could try to zoom in and see if my book was relevant to it (never a great sign) and various literary content replicating things I know about from elsewhere if I need to for professional reasons.

In the spirit of ‘I guess this is now my all-purpose work Instagram’ I followed basically every Jewish publication I could think of. Some are more active than others and I was soon inundated with various Jewish meant-to-be-humorous memes. There were suddenly all of these ‘Jewish dads are like so’ posts, presumably this was for Father’s Day, and I started to think, are they, though, because they read like Borscht Belt inflection but were also somehow by-and-for Gen Z Jewish women and it all felt derivative of a derivative and just deeply false and forced. I realized I was not the audience for whatever this was and unfollowed, leaving me with I think the bookstore I did my event at (that maybe still stocks the book, I have no way to know this from Instagram) and a lot of ads for cedar garden planters. I am somewhat interested in the planters.

Then, at a loss, the algorithm decided I wanted all-Pride all the time, which made sense in some ways but not others. Certainly every bookstore and publication I followed was all-in on Pride content for all of June as is their right, and if US-based, as is politically more-than-understandable. Urgent, even.

I decided not to personally ask the Eaton Centre Indigo whether they had plans to post my book-signing photo (the very impetus for setting up the account, their plans to do this, their suggestion) because virtually everything they were posting was Pride-related and—yes, before the whole ‘and during Pride’ stuff relating to the Walrus excerpt—I, unprompted, felt this would be a weird thing to follow up on myself. Excuse me but when is it time for my straight women book? But also, presumably for reasons connected to this being a gender-studies book, I also started getting mediocre and unfunny lesbian memes, along with the Jewish ones. Identity-centric stand-up comedy clips, now gay or non-binary women or AFABs, of the sort that I don’t seek out regardless of whether they match up with my own categories.

I tried to mitigate various forms of not-interesting-to-me content by following some of the same local vintage shops I do from my other account. I’m not sure what this has accomplished, other than that I now get ads for crummy-looking vintage shops possibly located in Toronto.

Maybe this will all turn into something amazing. Maybe I will more often remember I have this thing and post photos to it. (It is not going to sell even one copy of my book.) But I’m still doing Instagram wrong, because it has yet to morph into a site that makes me hate myself for not being a socialite.