Carousel: Part 1
The first of a two-part reflection on consumption and culture in social media
I’ve had a long-term, on and off relationship with social media. My Instagram footprint is small - I rarely post, and for most of the past 3 years, the app’s been deleted from my phone. While 26 year old Anand derived no small amount of self-righteousness from this edgy, voluntary exile, the true motivation was reticence, mixed with fear. Instagram always felt like a foreign language - this mass of aesthetic codes that dictated what was ‘post/story/reel/caption’ worthy. Overlaid was a ‘meta’ that seemed to value consistency and polish over spikiness and reinvention - it was, and remains overwhelming.
Recently, I’ve ventured back into these waters. I started using the platform more intentionally, and it’s been an eye-opening experiment. What follows are my reflections, and what they may suggest for culture and consciousness.
Note: These observations are subjective, and the hypotheses accompanying them are just that - hypotheses. I figured my relative inexperience with social media would allow for insights I haven’t yet seen (alternatively, I’m painfully uninformed on the subject).
Chimeras
On Instagram, you create and consume. In doing one, you typically achieve the other. As you consume, your engagement (and the algorithm) create a bespoke virtual space that is entirely your own. Only you are subject to its particular combination of content, voices and aesthetics. For me, this was a chimera of fitness content, news, politics, sketch comedy, celebrity culture, film/TV criticism, interior design, fashion, travel, music and a lovely sub-genre I call ‘softboi stoicism’. Some creators bridge these ‘genres’, but the cacophony is fascinating in and of itself.
First, we see content that could exist nowhere else, and this is special. Take Miss Excel. She has a phenomenal page that combines two passions - Excel and EDM - into a series of reels that teach Excel shortcuts set to EDM routines. Or take this playful sketch from itsnadirshah that turns marital domesticity into the final over of a cricket match. This isn’t just loving pastiche - it’s an instance of how short-form content can apply narrow genre trappings to a far wider set of narratives. It isn’t just marathon finishes or startup IPOs that deserve to be scored by Eminem, it’s regular life.
Second, these creators widen the ‘imagination window’. Exposure to chimeric content makes ‘weirdness’ accessible without normalising it. If millennial media literacy was defined by genre trappings - the western, the neo-noir, the superhero flick - then moving forward we should see these siloes break down as creators chafe against their restrictions. Genre-bending weirdness isn’t just acceptable - it’s celebrated. Irreverent absurdity resonates deeply in our culture, be it the maximalism of 'Everything Everywhere All at Once’, or the deadpan nihilism of Succession. Several forces are at play here—chief among them the growing diversity of creators—but it’s hard to believe that social media’s off-kilter, tongue-in-cheek mirror of our world isn’t one of them.
Even within genre boundaries, I see experimental takes on well worn narratives. Fitness content is a good example. The core message of most fitness content is broadly the same - move often, eat healthy. However, creators have approached this in a remarkable variety of ways. The prototype is the hyper masculine ‘gym bro’ defined by an unironic devotion to all out intensity. Cue intense EDM, fast edits, and hulked out creators hawking self-deprivation and sweaty salvation. No pain no gain. Then you have the alt-guru - ‘science-based lifter’, whose content primarily consists of testing fitness myths (typically the ones parroted by category one ‘gym bros’) in a tone best described as ‘academic snark’. Noel Deyzel, by contrast, leans into the gym bro archetype only to subvert it, using a familiar physique to wholesome, comedic effect.
The Flattening
During my Instagram experiment, neck deep in scroll hell, I often saw clips of the genocide in Gaza or the conflict in Sudan sandwiched between trailers for Superman and cultural commentary on the Labubu craze. For a few seconds, I was given a window to staggeringly real tragedies a few thousand miles away - documentary, not fiction.
My emotional temperature spiked. I was outraged and indulged my momentary activism through the only tools available - like, share and follow. The algorithm then decided that I needed to calm down - cue a clip of Dakota Johnson from The Materialists. I was softened - the rage was dulled, and in a few flicks, I was fixated on Gully Labs’ latest sneaker drop. Like an ECG reading, this rollercoaster follows predictable patterns, melding suffering and banality into an infinite slipstream. In doing so, the algorithm reinforces their equal claims to our attention. Do I think our feeds should be homogenous? No - our world is too complex - but there are causes and events that merit more eyeballs than others. Even the interface - the scroll - signals that there’s always another reel - that when the spikes get too much, we can escape with a flick.
When news competes for scarce real-estate (column inches and airtime), consumers must engage with a (largely) consistent fact base. Yes, this setup lends narrative control to media houses, but omissions in these narratives are more obvious because more consumers are examining the same subject. By contrast, we can entirely avoid tragedy in our bespoke virtual spaces if we choose to. We can opt out of real life, flatten the ECG.
If every horror and every joy are flattened into equal weight by the scroll, how do we remember what truly matters? And when the carousel never stops spinning, how do we know when to get off?