A couple of years ago, intrigued with the hype around this thing called “Instagram”, I downloaded the app onto my phone. After a very brief scout around this social media platform, designed for photo and short video sharing, I didn’t find anything that particularly piqued my interest and so my Instagram account sat idle. In January of this year I started writing poetry as a means of gaining confidence in my writing and expand my vocabulary. As someone not entirely comfortable with my writing abilities I thought Instagram the perfect place to share my creations. The ideal balance between ‘space and place’ (Tuan, 1977) to push myself outside of my comfort zone.
Drawing on Tuan’s notion of place providing a sense of security and space enabling the feeling of freedom (Tuan, 1977, p.3), I had the security of posting from my own place – my Instagram page, while affording me the freedom to share to an infinite audience worldwide, through space, if I so wished. It soon became apparent to me how naïve I had been to think of Instagram in such a simplified way.
In ‘Lost Geographies of Power’, Allen describes power as being “a relational effect of social interaction” (Allen, 2003, p.2), this I find evidence of within the Instagram poetry community. Manipulation is used in the power plays that are involved in the ‘following’ and ‘unfollowing’ of other users, validating your worthiness as a writer. The more ‘followers’ that you have, and who, dictates your position in the poetry food chain. Domination comes in the form of those higher up on this food chain forming alliances and asserting themselves as a clique you need to be a part of. And it is these cliques who then create poetry competitions and ‘feature’ your work seducing you with the implied prize of wider recognition if they deem your work deserving of such (Allen, 2003, p.2). This is quite clearly a social creation given that these people have no more professional writing accolades than the rest of us amateur poets.
At this point, I feel it only fair, that I’m honest and admit that I was briefly blindsided by all of this allure of poetic stardom myself. That was until I realised that my writing had shifted away from my original intention of self-expression and I had started to edit myself in order to fit into the ‘space’ created by others. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Social Studies of Science and Technology, graced the TED talk stage and highlighted, this very phenomenon, of editing ourselves in the virtual world, in her "Connected, but alone?" talk in 2012 (Turkle, 2012). It is the Instagram users, as Dr Victoria Kuttainen explained in this week’s lecture, that “learn the rules of social media early on” (Kuttainen, 2017) and thus discover they have a form of charismatic power that allows them to assert their dominance over those new to this realm who, in turn, may then find themselves editing their very existence.
References:
* Allen, J. (2003). Lost Geographies of Power. Oxford, England: Blackwell Publishing.
* Tuan, Y. (1977). Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. London, England: Edward Arnold.
* Kuttainen, V. (2017). BA1002: Our Space: Networks, Naratives, and the Making of Place. Week 3 notes [PowerPoint slides]. Retrieved from http://learnjcu2017.jcu.edu.au
* Turkle, S. (2012, February). TED Talk: Connected, but alone? [Video Podcast]. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/sherry_turkle_alone_together
* The unexamined life is not worth living [Image]. (2016). Retrieved from https://michaelmackintosh.com/unexamined-life-not-worth-living/
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