On August 31st, Jennifer Lopez posted sixteen pictures for her two hundred and fifty-one million followers on Instagram, under the gnomic caption “Oh, it was a summer.” Coming in the wake of a very public divorce filing, which ended her much tabloided two-year reunion with Ben Affleck, the images evinced an attitude of whimsical insouciance: there were mirror selfies alongside a scene of folded laundry, a picture of her child’s Super Mario backpack, and a slide of black text on a white background declaring, “Everything is unfolding in divine order.” Compared to J. Lo’s previous Instagram posts, which tended toward slim selections of professional photographs and video clips from runway shows, the new photos looked like intimate and improvised products from her own phone camera. Over all, the album might as well have been a slightly unwieldy update from a non-famous friend going through some relationship trouble. (Stars: they post just like us.)
Recently, on Instagram, this excess is by design. In early August, the platform doubled the maximum number of photos allowed in users’ carrousels, from ten to twenty per post, enabling the sort of sprawling so-called photo dumps that would once have felt anathema to the platform’s aura of careful curation. Today’s Instagrammer no longer chooses one representative photo at a time, creating a grid of images just so; instead, users, especially those belonging to Gen Z, are putting up faux-messy but actually carefully selected compendia showcasing the detritus of their lives.
This summer, I could tell when rent was due by the sudden profusion of dumps; the final days of the month seemed to trigger some kind of retrospective mania. The albums that appeared mingled vacation snapshots and restaurant pics with posed portraits, pet photos, screenshotted memes, and blurry video clips. At first glance, they seemed to be chaotic jumbles, but the collections of images often conveyed an over-all atmosphere—a vibe—by way of juxtaposition, with the disparate scenes cohering like the elements of a collage. I sort of appreciated this attention to gestalt, but the sheer volume of dumps became overwhelming: I don’t have time to flip through monthly recaps of the lives of everyone I follow at once! The captions might have been the most frustrating element. Each one seemed to outdo the last in its ostentatious meaninglessness; they were the textual equivalent of a coy shrug, as if to say, “I don’t even know why I’m doing this, let alone why you’re looking at it.” The phrase “life lately” was a popular choice, as were “the last few days :)” and “~[insert month] vibes~”. The lowercase, perhaps paired with an emoji, emphasized that you were posting off the cuff. (Common additions were 🌞 and ✨, providing an air of seasonal effervescence.) A friend and fellow dump skeptic summarized the tone to me as “being-alive vibes.” But, if all social-media posting serves as a proof of life, do we really need the belabored reminders?
Like trends in fashion, the dominant style of social media oscillates between aestheticized perfection and aestheticized mess, between minimalism and maximalism. One precedent for the Instagram dump was the Facebook album of the late two-thousands, a time when online content was less carefully curated because it was still meant for a small audience of real-life friends. If you posted, say, thirty very similar photos from a party the night before, after uploading them with difficulty from a D.S.L.R. camera, you could bet that everyone who saw them would sift through the pile to hunt for themselves, their friends, and evidence of drama. Later, with the popularization of Instagram and the proliferation of various content flowing through our feeds, social media became more of a broadcast system, reaching strangers as well as friends, and we became more self-aware, and thus more surgical, about what we posted.
The current surge in dumps has its roots in the pandemic. Back then, posting a bunch of images at once suited the circumstances: in isolation, no particular moment stood out that much from the others, and rampant pandemic-related anxiety left us little energy to fret over what we shared. (Any proofs of life, in those months, felt welcome.) By 2021, young celebrities, including the pop stars Dua Lipa and Olivia Rodrigo and the YouTuber Emma Chamberlain, had adopted the habit. Guides on how to post your own photo dumps followed, tutoring users on how to carefully achieve something haphazard-looking. “Compared to your usual pristine spread of food, there’s more nonchalance to an image of half-eaten dinner,” one instructed. “If you’re feeling particularly enigmatic, go for a single emoji,” another advised.
Nonchalance achieved chalantly is nothing new, but the way it is being encouraged on social media today reflects increasing structural limitations to life online. Instagram’s algorithmic recommendations appear to favor image dumps. Hootsuite, the social-media-management tool, found that “carousel posts get 1.4 times more reach and 3.1 times more engagement than regular posts.” When I asked my own Instagram followers why so many people were posting big albums, many said that doing so seemed to be the only way to get attention on the platform these days, though they also felt a tinge of guilt for bombarding their audiences. One respondent described posting a single image as “humiliating”; another, a Gen Z-er, said that it was a “social risk.” No one wants to be judged on just one photo when that post will be appearing in the same feeds as those of professional influencers and glossy magazines. Social media is no longer meant for connecting with friends; it is designed almost entirely to facilitate the following of brands and the monetizing of personalities.
Trying to mark life moments or maintain a photographic diary in the midst of such rampant commodification is, at this point, almost an act of resistance. Yet the twenty-image dump is also supplying exactly what Instagram, as a platform, needs more of: high-engagement, high-volume content. We follow platforms’ unwritten and ever-shifting rules, and we are rewarded with more attention; we attempt to counteract the overflow of content by putting out an overflow of our own. In the long term, the platform wins, and we’re left forcing new formats to fit our old goal of interacting with friends. Humiliating though it may be, I’ve lately been posting individual photos to my Instagram account, as if it were 2013 again: images of a breakfast or a dinner, snapshots of my shoes when I’m out on a run. I’ve started time-stamping them in the captions, because the app has become vexingly anti-chronological: though I post the photos in real time, those who follow me might not see them until days or weeks later. These minimalist dispatches are such outliers amid the dumps that my friends seem appreciative; contrary to the statistical evidence, my lone pics have been attracting more likes than usual. Maybe it will become a new trend—single-posting. You, too, can get off the carrousel. ♦
