#184: Using Social Media for Anti-Loneliness
We would love to create the Community For Change on Instagram...
https://www.instagram.com/community_for_change/
But we don’t want any of the negatives that are often assumed to reflect the inherent nature of the medium.
We don’t buy that. We think Instagram is a tool and, like other tools, we can have it reflect the attributes we find alluring.
I think people get cynical about the possible pretension many spaces allow for or encourage… society may have a lot of “that” so why wouldn’t our tools?
But society has a yearning perhaps also for joy and passion and fun and letting our guard down and operating un-self-consciously and with compassion too…
If sometimes out in the world there CAN be dangers in just letting our hair down, well, maybe the Community For Change can be one where we really don’t.
Pressure off.
Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love (people on streets) dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
I will reach out to request photos as we go, OR feel free to just jump the gun and send what you might like.
“But what might I forward Lauren??”
I am glad you asked:
(1) An anti- pet peeve in the form of a photo to share or
(2) Any photographs from CFC gatherings or when you have spent time with other CFC members…
And maybe a smidge of written context
…please send them via direct message on Instagram or email lauren@coburnventures.com
-Pip
Join theCFCon Instagram: Using Social Media for Anti-Loneliness
In preparation for writing about the Community for Change and Instagram, Pip asked me to think about perhaps my own first Instagram post. I remember it very clearly, actually. It was back in 2012 when my older, cooler cousin told me about this app called Instagram where you could post photos. I downloaded it, and my first photo was of bouquets of sunflowers I had hung upside down with twine – with a very heavy, color-saturated filter, of course.
But I can’t scroll back on my profile to find that photo, because I have set up a profile, deleted, and then set up another profile three times since then.
I’ve always had a bit of a skeptical relationship with social media and have erred to the side that it tends to do more harm than good. Platforms like Instagram are really good at making us feel “connected” – but as usage has increased over time, so have feelings of loneliness and depression in our society. We forget that our feeds are just people’s heavily-filtered, hand-picked highlight reels and it’s easy to ask, “what am I doing wrong? Why don’t I have that?” I won’t even start going down the rabbit hole too of what we know about how Facebook designs for addiction, controversies around data collection and leakage, and challenges around content moderation.
We are currently finding ourselves in a strange moment (to say the least) where are physically isolated from one another at a time where – I imagine, I know I am certainly speaking for myself – many people just want to be in the presence of loved ones. And the best thing to do for those loved ones is sit at home. It’s terribly ironic. And I have been asking myself…social media is a tool for digital connection despite social distancing. But how can we reimagine the mechanics of this tool to encourage ANTI-LONLINESS? As Rabbit Irwin Kula has been saying this week, how can we encourage “social nearing” while being physically apart?
I think of the Community for Change Instagram we recently started as a sort of “experiment” in this. How? A few things come to mind –
We want to keep the CFC followers/ who we follow to a relatively tight knit group of people who we know/ who know us personally. We aren’t here to get as many followers as possible – we would want this to be a medium for connecting people in more real-time who may only get to see each other once or twice a year.
We aim to be transparent and “human” in what we post and in the content we write. This means calling people by name in our writing, not heavily filtering photos or descriptions, and being open and honest about context.
Like just about everything we do with the CFC, we aim to have joy run through all of our interactions on Instagram – starting with the photo anti-pet peeves we started posting last week (please send us one!).
The poet Ross Gay says, “Joy [is] the labor that will make the life that I want possible. It is not at all puzzling to me that joy is possible in the midst of difficulty.”
In the midst of heavy and difficult times, joy can create moments of levity. That is what we are hoping to do with our Instagram.
While I couldn’t find that first post, I did find a screenshot I took from my friend’s Instagram in, I think, 2015.
If you’re familiar with the current layout of the app and the now popular filters…how is that for a throwback??