Normal sounds - by Rob Horning - Internal exile

When people need a sense of what success and social inclusion look like, in their immediate circle and in the concentric rings broadening out toward their aspirational horizons, they look at Instagram. It is where users can consume normativity. They can scroll until they have struck some sort of balance between anxiety and reassurance about where they fit into society, and then they can close the app. Consuming normativity can give us the illusion that we get to sample it when we choose, that it isn’t pressing in on us at all times. But at the same time, the desire to seize control of normativity — to grasp social values in circulation, to recalculate one’s own status and level of conformity, to track the degree to which one has inevitably fallen behind fashion — also generates a certain ambivalence. It confronts us with our lack of autonomy and the instability of our social position; it testifies to the necessity of constant self-presentation (as opposed to being accepted for how our

When people need a sense of what success and social inclusion look like, in their immediate circle and in the concentric rings broadening out toward their aspirational horizons, they look at Instagram. It is where users can consume normativity. They can scroll until they have struck some sort of balance between anxiety and reassurance about where they fit into society, and then they can close the app. Consuming normativity can give us the illusion that we get to sample it when we choose, that it isn’t pressing in on us at all times. But at the same time, the desire to seize control of normativ