The Perils of the “Photo Dump” - by Madison Huizinga

I first downloaded Instagram the summer before sixth grade. Charmingly awkward and socially aloof, I probably posted close to ten photos a day for the first few years I had it. I would open up the camera on the Instagram app and snap pictures of the world around me. Even though I was a child then, still learning social cues, this usage seemed in tandem with how adults in my life were using Instagram as well. Maybe they weren’t posting ten times a day, but the pictures they shared were utterly raw. Grainy, blurry, and sometimes slapped with an aggressive filter. It was a place to more easily share life with family, friends, and acquaintances. A digital version of a family photo album sitting on your grandma’s coffee table. Virtual postcards stuck with magnets on a fingerprint-smudged refrigerator. Thanks for reading Madison’s Newsletter! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Upgrade to paid Fast forward to roughly 2012 through 2018, rather than a laid-back flipboo

I first downloaded Instagram the summer before sixth grade. Charmingly awkward and socially aloof, I probably posted close to ten photos a day for the first few years I had it. I would open up the camera on the Instagram app and snap pictures of the world around me. Even though I was a child then, still learning social cues, this usage seemed in tandem with how adults in my life were using Instagram as well. Maybe they weren’t posting ten times a day, but the pictures they shared were utterly raw. Grainy, blurry, and sometimes slapped with an aggressive filter. It was a place to more easily sh