Social Media, Content Consumption, and Colonization

Colonization is about careless and callous consumption. You don’t recognize the many ways in which you are being given information that is intended to send you into an emotional frenzy. That’s a key tactic in colonization that isn’t talked about enough. You can colonize a group of people’s minds by having them in a constant state of fear.

So what does that all mean? You have to be more thoughtful about what you consume. Meaning, you have to think about it. Like, pay attention to how you feel after having seen, heard, or read something unnerving and immoral. 

If you’re in a constant state of fear or feel as though you are looking to escape, chances are you’re going to find a place to escape to. This is where social media and the incessant need to scroll down a timeline comes into play. Social media is one of the greatest distractions and optical illusions we see today. Capitalistic consumer culture thrives off of this particular tool of distraction. People see pictures and videos of what looks like, a life that they want and can maybe even have if they too participate in certain lifestyles, routines, habits, and circles.

The rise of social media has always been of great interest to me. The Internet world taking over and becoming an integral piece of everyday life was quite fascinating. It grew at such a rapid pace and still is. And in 2015, I decided I wanted to do my own kind of study of this new cultural shift that was taking place. An Instagram study to observe the cultural shift and consumption of the social media app and picturesque “reality” that is so carefully curated and fed to its users. I voluntarily choose to study Instagram in 2015 when I realized people were starting to engage with the app much differently than they had before. The consumption of the app and the desire to build a picture-perfect cool image on Instagram quite literally ate up society, globally. So many people are stuck in the Instagram hype that there are people who don’t even use the app to post, they just watch and scroll. Sometimes mindlessly. It’s almost zombie-like the way humans are grabbing at their phones to scroll down their social media timelines; whether it’s Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, or Snapchat. The distraction and illusion that is built into social media apps are too easily accessible to give up. There’s a façade that while people are aware of it, they can’t help but to buy into it, because after all, it’s easy to believe what your eyes are telling you. However, we are mostly all aware that optical illusions exist. The other thing with humans that one should be mindful of is the ease at which they follow a trend. How does this come into play with Instagram though? Well in short, when someone looks like they’re cool on Instagram or online, they get more engagement. In other words, their likes, comments, and views go up. More people start to see them and in turn, more people may believe what their eyes are telling them through a series of pictures, videos, and stories. The content they are consuming quite literally leads them to believe a certain set of ideals. Here’s an easy example to give you an idea. Generally speaking, if you are constantly watching someone look as though they live a life of luxury based on their Instagram feed, chances are you believe that person is rich, or something close to it. I chose that example because it’s also easy to show people that just because you think you see something, doesn’t mean it’s true. Back to the example, that person could very well not actually be able to afford that lifestyle they’re maintaining on social media. This is also not me saying that every person you see doing something considered to be luxurious cannot afford it. It’s simply to say you do not know the ins and outs of a person’s life based on their social media pages. So, therefore, you shouldn’t seek to live your life the way they display theirs in their online profiles. This is one of the many reasons the internet and social media can be so dangerous. 

People are easily lulled and seduced into a lifestyle that looks so alluring to them that they start to hate the beauty of their own lives. It quite literally changes people and the way they consume what’s around them in their actual day to day lives, not just their online virtual ones.  People get the chance to be whoever they want to be on the internet. Whichever version of self you feel like being, the internet is there for you to do it. People are generally much bolder with their word choice and persona on the internet than they are in real life because they don’t measure the consequences of the internet the same as they do in person. It’s not that the internet is lawless, but people still don’t understand how natural law applies to the internet. They do understand things like the law of attraction though, and that’s only to a degree. The law of attraction applies here in the sense of, what you consume online and what you do online, is going to follow you in real life as well. If you are posting certain content or consuming certain content, the energy that comes with that content is going to linger and last in your lived reality. When we became obsessed with reality television we opened a gateway to a path of a civilization that was going to be over time, less intelligent than it had the potential to be. We were presented with a constructed reality on television that gave people the taste and desire for a life with more excitement. Add social media into that mix and you’ve got quite the deadly cocktail combo. What does all of this have to do with colonization though? A great tool of colonization is distraction. Social media allows you to check out and scroll through the content of your choice. With the ability to completely disregard and ignore the possibility of more authentic content being out there. Instagram is notorious for pushing curated content to its users. You just have to make sure that people see the content. And how exactly is that done? Well, in the beginning, people were using apps to boost their posts. Like for like and follow for follow apps. The more likes or followers you got, the more people engaged and followed because it looks like that’s the ‘cool’ thing to do. Here’s a little secret, at the start of this cultural shift, people, and your favorite celebrities included, downloaded the apps, and used the app to like pictures on Instagram. What?! Favorite celebrity included?! Yes. Them too. That was actually what drew my attention to it. Studying celebrities and their IG posts. It was unbelievable that in less than 30 seconds they could garner thousands of likes.

So, I downloaded a few of the apps myself and sure enough, as I was liking pictures to collect coins, there would pop up these celebrity accounts. Now how do I know it was their actual page and not some fake account? Easy. I’d like the picture in the L4L and F4F app, and then I’d immediately go to my Instagram and see my most recently liked picture activity. I’d click the picture and would then be taken to the verified celebrities account. Meaning, they use these apps to gain likes to encourage other humans to actually double-tap the pictures themselves and not a robot. This went on for YEARS before Instagram finally did something about it. Much to their dismay, you can still do this, you just have to pay a lot more money for access to the companies that do it. People are inherently like sheep and can be easily herded. When a picture has a lot of likes, subconsciously more people then want to like it because of the number influence associated with the post. I’m sharing this all because it’s so important to understand that most, if not all, of the content you consume on the Instagram app, in particular, is very strategically curated and designed for you to believe that what you see is real. The dreadful part about all of this is that it all actually started with reality television. The reality tv world and social media world together are dangerous. They create illusions that look so real people begin to get depressed about their own realities thinking that the optical illusion is real. I will say that 2020 has been really great for lifting the lens that people were seeing a lot of these optical illusions through. Truth be told, we’re only just getting started on that front, but that’s a story for another time. This is about my findings regarding Instagram and Social Media as a whole. On Instagram, many people have created these false realities of their lives online and now that Instagram cracked down on most of these apps, the jig is up. Here’s the thing though Instagram can be one of the BEST marketing and business tools, so if you’re smart and you were able to successfully get people to follow you by creating the illusion that you had a lot of followers and likes, theoretically you then should have been able to gain some kind of profit from it. A lot of big influencers right now can say this, and that’s a GREAT thing. Instagram is a great business tool now, simply because of the way people consume it. Successfully boosting yourself to an influencer back then was a lot faster to attain. The irony I’m seeing in this study now though is that more and more companies are turning to the micro-influencer market. Why? Authenticity and consistency. Typically, micro-influencers have more authentic and consistent engagement with their following. They may not get a lot of likes but perhaps they have a lot of people commenting and engaging with the post that way. The post may also have been shared several times and gained more impressions and views, but not necessarily likes. That’s still quality engagement and shows that people actually listen to them and take their recommendations more frequently, which then translates to more dollars for the sponsor. You may be wondering what kinds of accounts took advantage of these L4L (like for like) and F4F (follow for follow) apps the most? In no particular order or hierarchy, celebrities, businesses, news channels, IG baddies (men, women, nonbinary alike), people looking to look cool, and the average citizen. People are constantly looking for ways to connect and these online virtual communities have allowed people to over-connect. To be constantly tuned into a world that is not the world that is right in front of them. To live the life that’s in front of them from behind a lens and not be present in their everyday lived reality. Which are a gift and a curse in a lot of ways. 

As humans, we naturally want to connect, and the reason why is because connection is incredible since it is so many different possibilities of feelings wrapped into one. You can connect and have excitement, joy, fear, anger, any of those, and then some. The trouble with the way we connect today is that it’s not organic. A lot of people are comfortable with the connections and the reality that they’ve created online, however, in-person they’re not capable of maintaining that same connection. I haven’t studied enough people to make a hypothesis on why they’re unable to maintain said connections in person, but I’ve observed that pattern across this study of people and the way they engage with social media. My advice is to connect with yourself first and you’ll then be able to connect with others. People relate to what they see and believe is similar to their own experiences. The greatest connection is going to come from true, authentic, shared experiences or curiosity of the experiences. I’ll leave you with this, be mindful about what you connect with and consume. The energy around you is impacted by what you consume (and yes that includes your food too).