I’ve always questioned myself about the relationship of surplus value and time when time is scarce and in what circumstances do people start perceiving time as more valuable than money. Above than that, when money cannot buy certain desired experiences because these require one’s personal touch, collaboration and cannot be predelivered by acquisition.
The fundamental difficulty with this transition is in how we describe, represent and classify an experience versus an object which projects it’s crystallized appearance and attributes before it’s broader utility suggestiveness.
In social media reality because of inherent platforming limitations, it’s a lot easier to uncontextually just take a picture of an object/scene, than it’s to define and portrait the actual multitude of experiences which the object and the physical context/environment can provide as well as portraying that with other people.
Let me contextualize, Instagram in general tends to represent reality in very transient and aesthetic fashion without ever developing the context and describing a narrative.
This happens because of 2 major factors, no possibility to tag other well defined contents (these could be interests) to a particular post which more descriptively define a particular experience and the inability to have proper video streaming functionality, as well as being able to easily incorporate video contents from other platforms.
Let’s take this particular post which appeared on my Insta’s algorithmic feed, as an example:
If you’ve never seen any of these 2 persons before, you might ask yourself, what is this?
This picture is from a scene of a trendy Korean TV series available on Netflix called “Squid Game”, the person on the right in an actress and the person on the left was just photoshopped by a fan into replacing the other actress with her own face.
The thing is, how would you know what’s this in the 1st place?
The hashtags don’t lead to anything relevant to it, it’s not possible to tag the show to an official page which describes all the elements of this TV show (and also suggest you others you might like), you cannot attach any other defined elements or custom interests to it, thereby you’re unable to interconnect with others who are also interested in it through this content and explore it more deeply.
It’s so boring and limited…, and as I’ve discussed in another post there are also better alternative methods that hashtags, I have my own concept of rich tags, which are a way more featureful method to link different contents.
2nd example:
This is a picture of a restored original Game Boy with a backlit screen upgrade showing some 2nd series Pokemon game.
It’s all very cool but, once again tags won’t lead to anything specific just more random posts which it’s tags even those which are more specific such as #pokemongold won’t lead to anything pertaining and specific to it.
Everything is mostly about aesthetics and not the representation of experience itself.
Let’s imagine I want to find more specifics about this particular game or even people who have also played it and have created content about the experience of playing the game itself, not just pictures of plastic cartridges.
3rd example:
Who is this, where is this, and why?
This is a post from an online fashion shop with advertisement purposes. Even if we were to question that most posts in Instagram’s algoritmic feed are indeed paid promoted ones, if Instagram’s intention is to become a social media online shopping centre it quite fails short on it even from that point of view.
In order to create the most interesting balance between a platforms comercial interest and all the other non comercial oriented contents available, ideally you could have a Etsy like platform / module or marketplace section where people can actually navigate items and purchase them, such strategy would prevent traffic going outwards as well as desintegrating focus away from the platform itself.
I don’t think it would be necessary to integrate a payment system, but as just as a meta search engine which links items to the specific shops webpage and an API to manage such entries.
This way people could actually directly share a specific item in their profile and attaching whatever they would like to the post itself, making the experience much more sociable and interesting overall.