Dump, post, repeat: how Instagram became a social media junkyard

Our photo dumps used to be an aesthetic disruption. Now we’re just bending to the app’s will

Last year, I took 658 photos during my four-day trip to Venice. Fifteen years ago, I would have posted every single one of them to Facebook. And as I waited the three hours for them to upload, I would have opened another tab to look through all 500 photos in my second-cousin’s friend’s FLORIDA ‘09 Facebook album, which would have included 48 shots of the same sunset and 16 of a chip flavor she didn’t have back at home.

Nowadays, with Instagram as our primary photo-sharing method, that packet of chips would end up on slide seven of what my second-cousin’s friend would call a dump: a retrospective of her summer compacted into a carousel of artfully artless images.