Insta: Anatomy of a scroll

The amount of time I spend on my phone killing time or seeking distraction out of habit is regularly concerning to me. Not capital “C” concerning, like what state will this world be in when my kids inherit it. But lower case “c” concerning, like am I rotting my brain on this stuff, when I could be doing anything more constructive.

I picked Instagram as my app of choice a while ago and then further refined that to be a source of inspiration. Mostly following artist, musicians, sports, and skateboarding. But that intent has been massively diluted over the years. My anecdotal experience is one jammed up with ads, suggested accounts, and often more videos than pictures. So lets test it with some real world tracking, ten days, scroll through 15 post, and see what gets served up.

There is always room for conformation bias doing something like this. But this little exercise certainly confirmed my anecdotal experience of feeling like I am seeing more and more stuff I didn’t intentionally sign up for. The pipeline is rotten and more of it keeps coming into my head.