Advanced Studies In Instagram

Have you heard of this new thing, Instagram? They have these things called reels. An introduction.

  When I left Twitter, after the Elon Musk takeover, I left my 40K followers behind and went to Instagram, a place where I had spent maybe 2 hours over the course of a few years.

    Instagram, knowing so little about me, just started throwing reels in my direction. I must have mentioned that I like a few songs by Madness because to this day I am inundated with Madness content. Chas Smash, one of the great hype men. He co-wrote ‘Our House’, you know, not just the guy saying “Hey you, don’t watch that…” in that goofy voice. I digress… it’s designed for digressions. I’m only doing what it’s trained me to do.

     The first thing I noticed was that I was getting a lot of reels with people doing a very specific dance to an old song called “Pink Shoelaces”. Intriguing. I asked my friends if they were getting these as well. There was one reel that seemed to be getting a lot of traction, it was 2 stone-faced women in red in front of a brick wall. Maybe it was THEIR dance. They seemed really good at it, and there was some serious intent in their eyes. You can’t fake that. Turns out it was from ‘The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel’. It’s a dance from a TV show inside the TV show. Layers of narrative. Like John Barth or Inception, but this is real. This is life in 2024. People saw a dance they liked and decide to film themselves doing that dance. Fascinating.

    At the same time, concurrently, I started getting reels showing me Hayley from Paramore doing a very specific dance in the middle of a song called “Caught In The Middle”. I must admit that I thought Paramore was the band that did the “Wake me up inside!” song. They’re not. That was Evanescence. Completely different. This was when I started asking questions.

     Why did they think I wanted to see this? OK, it was only one question.

     It doesn’t matter what I wanted, what matters is that eventually I was passing through Instagram reels and thinking “Hayley really nailed the dance at this show!” or “Hayley cut her hair! It really gives the dance a new flavor!” I still haven’t listened to the entire ‘Caught In The Middle’ song. You know how crowds sometimes rush the stage when a band plays their hit? Apparently in this new age crowds rush the stage when a band plays the part of the hit that is viral on TikTok. They freak out for 30 seconds or so. This is what I’ve been told. Not like I’ve seen a reel that can back up this story. It IS what I’d do if I ever find myself at a Paramore show. I would be the middle aged weirdo sitting calmly until the middle of that song, when I would jump up and dance frantically for 20 seconds, then sit down and begin posting about how Hayley really nailed the dance. “You’ve got to see it live! Videos don’t capture it. Like a Rembrandt or a Vermeer. Nothing replaces being there in the Rijks Museum!”

     Your reward for pausing momentarily on anything is more of it. So if you see a reel about people who are really into Teletubbies, just keep moving, don’t ask why you’re getting this content. Don’t stop, look, say “What the hell is up with this?” because that means you just signed up for a lot of Teletubbies content. You can’t unsubscribe from this stuff. Maybe one day it will get bored of you, but it will always remember you. Luckily that hasn’t happened yet to me, but considering how our devices are reading everything we write, listening to everything we say, I suppose I just signed up for it. Maybe you’ve signed up for it by reading this. Sorry, it’s too late. The damage is done. It can’t all be cute viral choreography.

     Don’t see much of the Mrs. Maisel dance these days. Now it’s all about dancing to ‘Disco’ by Surf Curse or ‘Paging Dr. Beat! Emergency!’, even that one is on its way out. I feel like the ‘Caught In The Middle’ dance is going to be a perennial, it will always come back, like the McCartney Xmas song or that video of the little girl interrupting her dad’s on-screen interview.

     I can try to approach this from an anthropologist’s perspective. Why were we given this? Did we ask? Was it inevitable? Does it give us what we want before we know what we want? It may be much simpler at its heart: Hayley is just really good at that ‘Caught In The Middle’ dance.