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Instagram and the Facebook Revulsion Effect

This article is more than 10 years old.

Instagram (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Like a lot of people, I joined Instagram when I got an iPhone a few months ago. Since then, my Instagramming has been modest. I've posted a grand total of 18 shots, and have a social network of a few dozen, mostly people who know me from Twitter. I view it as a fun and interesting, if not thus far essential service; I like it but don't really care about it.

So why did I, also like a lot of people, react to the news of Facebook's purchase of Instagram with an almost visceral sense of distaste and disappointment? As the news spread across Twitter, I watched as many people express disgust and frustration and Insta-delete their accounts, so as to avoid the Borg-like assimilation of their data and the corruption of whatever fleeting enjoyment they derived from Instagram as it was absorbed and remade by Zuckerberg and Co.

Maybe we're all jumping the gun here. Mark Zuckerberg says they plan to leave Instagram as a free-standing service, which makes sense given its elegant simplicity (something Facebook definitely does not have). So it won't necessarily be absorbed and degraded, as Twitter has done with Tweetdeck. I'm not deleting my account yet. Let's wait and see exactly what they go from here.

But there's a lesson in this powerful Facebook aversion. I use Facebook, but with increasing reluctance. This isn't because I don't like sharing; I do. It's because Facebook is obnoxious. The "frictionless sharing" it has been pushing is particularly objectionable: I want to control what I share with other people, not have them know I happened to be reading the latest on Kate Moss and cat-breeding in the Daily Mail.

There is something basically upside-down here. In an ideal world, we would control our own personal content. Your photos, posts, and comments would be owned by you, and presented however you wanted, in an Internet space that all (or whoever you permitted) could access via various means. Instead, vast swaths of the social web, including those that many of us now consider essential to daily life, personal and business communication, news and entertainment media, politics, and even social change itself, are owned and managed by corporations that extract value from all that personal information.

We all know this, and most of these services are free, so why complain? As Dave Winer has noted, we treat Facebook, Twitter et al as de facto public utilities. And the bigger they get, the more like utilities they become, occupying a weird 21st-century space where nothing is truly public anymore, or the public is private, and vice versa. We don't pay much attention, trusting that there will be some consistency and accountability in the way they handle all our personal data - if not from the government, then from the marketplace.

There's a lot of structural anxiety in this relationship. Which is why a free-standing Instagram offered some relief. It was small, yet with a big network. Unlike the vast, murky, vaguely menacing mysteries of Facebook, you basically knew how it worked. (Though not really.) But now that's gone, and we're stuck with Facebook anxiety again.

We all have various identities floating around out there, with their own avatars, icons and passwords, only partially under our own control. If there's one lesson of the past century, it's that tech and communication businesses are ephemeral. What will happen to all my life-data as the inevitable upheavals unspool over the next 20 or 50 years?

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