Love in the Time of Instagram

Or, what I am showing you when I show you pictures of my children

I tried reading novels at first. Sleep was a challenge in the nights after our twins were born, and when my turn came to rock one of the girls to sleep in the nursery rocking chair, I would bring a book — Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses — and read it out loud.

I did this in the vain hope that my voice would calm my daughter down and the words would seep into my exhaustion-addled brain. It didn't last long.

Soon I needed a simpler task to while away the hours. A form of entertainment I could hold in my one free hand, without a reading lamp to irritate my daughter’s eyes. I started bringing my phone with me and scrolling Facebook until there was nothing left to see.

When you are a new parent, social media can fill a void: the sudden scarcity of adult interaction, the gulf that has formed between you and your childless friends. It feels shallow, but it's better than nothing.

And then everyone is begging for pictures of your beautiful baby, and of course you are happy to oblige. In the same way proud fathers once kept a foldout strip of family photos in their wallet, now we send a stream of photos into the ether, chronicling our children's every coo and waddle and ballet recital. We dote on our children like any other generation did; it's just so much easier for us to broadcast our love now.

I want to establish right now that I don't see social media as some scourge on modern life. I used to. I wrote the same opinion column for my college newspaper that every freshman opinion columnist wrote for every college newspaper in the country in 2007: “What if, like, social media is actually making us antisocial?”

Nathan Jurgenson, a social media theorist and author of the 2019 book The Social Photo, was arguing on Twitter the other day that social media haven’t unleashed any new depravity or antisociality on the world. They don’t “accelerate” or “amplify” underlying social processes, he argues; they just render those processes more “explicit.” 

I take his point. Teenagers, for example, are and have always been ornery, with or without Snapchat. Parenting is and has always been a bit of a drag at times, and I can't fault anyone for finding momentary respite on their phones. If you flick through Instagram on a long bus ride with your children or during an endless night with a fussy baby in your arms, or if you get a little endorphin rush from your friends' adoring comments on your family photos — more power to you.

Something has shifted, though. We see our children a little bit differently than our parents saw us.

When I take my children to the park, I can’t help thinking of the cloud cover and whether the sun will cast harsh shadows on their faces in photographs. Some part of my brain is always instructing my hand to pull out the phone and capture the moment for posterity and public consumption. Another part of my brain is resisting the urge, telling me to “stay in the moment,” so to speak. Whatever I do, the urge remains.

***

In The Social Photo, Jurgenson rejects the notion of "digital dualism," asserting that real life and online life are one and the same.

In a passage on the meaning of selfies, Jurgenson conceives of the connected smartphone camera as an extension of the eye in the palm of the hand. This brings to mind one of the creepiest monsters from the imagination of Guillermo del Toro, the Pale Man from Pan’s Labyrinth. (The Pale Man eats children in the movie, but let’s not take the metaphor there.)

Grotesque mental images aside, Jurgenson is not a moralizer. He is ambivalent about the medium of social photography, arguing that the technology is only a tool that exposes existing fractures in the community and the self.

The self, to Jurgenson, was always performative, always shifting. "I am what I think you think I am," he writes in a paraphrase of sociologist Charles Horton Cooley's early-20th-century theory of the "looking-glass self."

Wasn't there always something performative about parenting, too? In the way we parented children in public, long before social media allowed us to curate and tweak an online persona?

You've felt the public gaze when you disciplined your child in a grocery store. Didn’t you modify your tone of voice, your actions, your body language accordingly? Have you told the white lie that your son sleeps like an angel, that your daughter will be potty trained any day now? We parents have always put on a good face.

What changed? We gained a tool for aesthetic control. The “Kodak moment,” a special occasion worth documenting on the family camera, has spread itself out.

"Nearly every hour has the status once reserved for vacation and is encountered in more full awareness of its photographic potential," Jurgenson writes. 

Even when you are "logged off," even when you are "fasting" from social media, the photographic impulse is there. As Jean Baudrillard predicted in the middle of the 20th century, the camera went from changing the way we remember to changing the way we see.

***

This is all harmless, probably. But I see darkness around the edges.

Consider multi-level marketing. A consultant who sells, say, essential oils, must not only sell the product, but must also sell the lifestyle of her own family.

Follow some of these families on social media, and you'll start to notice a common template. It's not just a form letter that they follow in their cryptic inbox messages ("Hey, haven't seen you in forever, we should get coffee and talk about an exciting opportunity"), but a visual palette, too: Soft focus and white linens in the home, pristine floors and preternaturally clean children, all presented in service of the sale.

Pinterest boards overflow with visual inspiration for the aspiring network marketing guru.

"Your viewers would much rather see a pretty background or a neutral wall instead of a bathroom toilet or a room full of laundry," offers a helpful guide to selfies and home photography, via the blog of one multi-level marketing company.

I found this advice on the personal blog of a high-achieving multi-level marketer:

"Be a Product of the Product ~ use it and learn about it but DO NOT wait until you feel you are ready to share ... Just think about all the people you are depriving by not sharing and waiting until you feel ready.”

The home becomes a store. Children become marketing materials. Companies like these existed and thrived before social media. They just found a new way to spread.

***

Lest you accuse me of casting stones, I’ll make my own confession here: I have used pictures of my children for self-aggrandizement. This is, again, nothing new. The temptation has only taken on a new form.

When I post a photo of myself with my children on social media, I am framing and selecting the most flattering image of myself, not necessarily of my children. I want to look tired but vaguely handsome, spontaneous but disciplined, carefree but wise. Oh, the kid? Yeah, she’s cute too.

These words from Jurgenson’s book stuck with me:

When we share social photos, it seems apparent what they are revealing, but we need to think also about what they are concealing, the absences the images are framing or disguising.

After all, there is much that is left off the screen. We all have strategies we use to hide some of what we do, what we post, and who we are … In a stream of photos, it can be easy to forget the importance of the edge of the frame, the gaps between images. Each photo is at most only a limited truth, which raises as many questions as it answers. Knowledge comes standard with its opposite.

The instinct to self-edit and self-aggrandize is perfectly human and nothing new. I curate the self I show to the world; so too do I curate the version of my children I put on display.

Is it fair that I exhibit my children on social media without asking their permission? "Visibility is a trap,” the philosopher Michel Foucault wrote in 1975, referring to the then-nascent surveillance state and the controlling gaze of the public eye. Is it my right to set that trap for my children without their consent?

That last question is still bothering me. My wife and I never set a policy for sharing pictures of our children online. By default, we only post them on sites with strict privacy settings for our friends and family’s eyes only. Is that enough protection? When our children become old enough to question our judgment, how do I explain that hundreds of people they’ve never met have watched them grow up from afar?

I don’t want to overstate my case here. There is no cause for moral panic, but there is reason to pause.

Transport me to an earlier time, and self-appointed cultural critics would have tut-tutted my overindulgent slideshows of the family trip to Disney World. They would have seen me in my paternal rocking chair and wagged their finger at me for sticking my nose in a trashy cowboy novel instead of staring undistracted at my baby’s perfect face.

Here and now, my attention is split. My gaze follows the lens in the palm of my hand. To my son and daughters, when you read this one day: I see you and I love you with that eye too.