Freedom, that glorious word which drives America through each day and each era and is so important to us… it’s been completely revoked from our new milieu, and we’re totally okay with it. Freedom of speech is currently under siege (SOPA and PIPA). We don’t have freedom of choice—and we love it. Creativity, too, is gone; restriction strictly enforced. Individuality, au revoir. It’s the Internet age, babe, better get used to it.
Plugging along through the plugged-in world most of us have grown so necessarily connected to, a revelation quickly reifies: our treasured social media is the business district of the Internet metropolis. And if the Occupy movement has proved anything, it’s that the business district is a deplorable one. Suits move like a pinstriped tide in and out of towers wherein profit-mongering companies operate, grow, and absorb through means of control and restriction. A grey metaphor? Perhaps. But not entirely inaccurate—save for the villainous picture it paints of big business, because not all big corporations, after all, are freedom-revoking socio-economic control freaks—dictators of a new dimension—but it sure seems like it to the average user. By and large, we like our web-based freedom, and we like it free. Yet, looking back just a handful of years in the past and it’s clear: freedom means little, and little is free.
By whatever degree of legality you care to uphold within the electronic world (or the elemental one, for that matter), you can’t deny the fact that said free-ness is cool. Remember when Napster took the block out from under the music industry, damn well sending it into an economic Jenga-wobble thanks to free tunes for everyone? That was cool. Remember when AOL e-mail cost money? Probably not, because that was lame, and in no time cool Hotmail and Yahoo came along and were free. Damn cool! G-mail is pretty cool; it has all kinds of gadgets and toys, all free. And MySpace? Short lived, but free, and effectually cool. So cool, Facebook came along and humbled it, asserting social media as both the new cool thing, and impossible if not free.
Thing is, there’s a bevy of money in that free and, as I’ve stated, not a lot of freedom. What more does Facebook allow you to do that you couldn’t do before with any number of programs (or in the real world with a phone number and a mailing address)? Practically nothing. But here’s the catch: no self-expression. Imagine you and your thousand-some-odd Facebook friends standing in a uniform line… anyone who’s attended private school is going to have despairing recollections of sameness. Apart from your faces and freckly epidermis (i.e. profile picture and other apps) you and your friends have nearly exactly the same appearance. But it’s cool, we’ve been convinced, because it’s clean, trim, and sharp, and if you want creative, individualized freedom, go elsewhere on the Internet. Like Instagram.
The problem being, while the futures of dot-com businesses were previously uncertain, modern web-based companies are finding solid ground and a safe road ahead, with economic security all but assured. Google, Amazon, Facebook … these guys made it, and they’ll be sticking around for a while. One form of proof is in the exorbitant funds exchanged in deals and acquisitions; most recently the latter’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram. To many people, the buy, which happened April 9th, is new news. For others, it was an iniquitous move and a blow to cool. Because, even though Facebook’s hottest feature is photo-sharing capability, there were people out there who shunned that aspect of the social media giant and went elsewhere for cool image sharing. Instantly, to this faction, Instagram was no longer cool.
Devotees of the camera phone flash-editor may look at the recent acquisition and sigh (sigh), make statements of retort amongst their hip clique, and spout claims of abandonment and claims of “uncool,” but take an objective view, like from a high loft overlooking all things, and ask yourself if Instagram is really, actually, truly cool. The Instagram ideology in a nutshell: take a downward-view picture of your shoes (or any common thing in view) with your eight-mega-pixel smartphone, blanket it with a retro filter, post it to Facebook (not that you have to, but you would) so people can “like” it. What talent! Damn, you’re a skilful photographer. Meanwhile, there are properly hip dudes and chicks out there with 8mm film, tweaking the aperture on their Rolleiflex to actually create laudable images.
The whole thing bares some resemblance to Indie music from the hipster point of view. Say you’re a talented unsigned singer. As your pirated album spreads, you become cooler and cooler in the low-key, underground music scene. Most of the world has never heard your songs, but hipsters have—and they like what they hear; they dig you because of your selective popularity. Then you get signed, become famous, receive massive radio play and numerous YouTube video reduxs. Now it’s not just the stylishly unshaven, tight-jean-and-plaid-wearing kids on campus who listen to you—everyone does. You’re so popular your every move is scrutinized by TMZ. You take a social swan dive into a drained pool, only to rebound thanks to an SNL parody of your pathetic performance… which suddenly makes you cool again. (“Ladies and gentlemen, back by unpopular demand, Lana Del Rey!”)
So what does Facebook’s billion-dollar purchase of Instagram say about the perception of cool? Not a damn thing. In no time, if we haven’t already, we’ll forget the acquisition ever happened; we’ll continue on our day-to-day in our thousand-friend (anti)social media milieu, business as business, as it always was. The Internet meme will continue its exceptionally capitalistic parade. We’ll be controlled, we’ll backlash, we’ll acquiesce; then we’ll find something else cool and untouched by mega business. We’ll indulge and get buzzed for a bit on that lofty cool thing until the cyclical process repeats itself, and we’ll wish for the old way, the earlier version, and bitch again about the lost sanctity of our Internet freedom, which we never had in the first place.
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