Instaidentity Politics

This meme is not particularly flashy. Visually, it consists of blurry/pixelated black text on a stark gray background. This is notable because the average Instagram user’s behavior revolves around reproducing normative aesthetics i.e. images with conventionally beautiful, smiling subjects, utopic highlight reels finetuned to appear livelier than life itself, vibrant colors, clean and corporate-friendly graphic templates etc. Thus, from the outset, the meme momentarily ruptures the manicured world typical to Instagram, arresting the user in a state of dissonance. In this external space of rupture, the user is displaced from the regular motions and engaged by a plain textual statement that commands total attention. The meme is concise, yet effective. It reads as a declarative slogan, employing sensationalist language (“crisis”) that rejects the very medium both the user and the meme exist on; in this rejection of a preexisting realm for wrestling with crises of selfhood, the user is naturally guided to imagine what new spaces/verbs will offer potential terrain for critical introspection beyond “Instagram(med)”.

Notably, the meme’s sentence structure has historical roots, acting as a play on Gil Scott-Heron’s now infamous poem/song, “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised.” Written in 1971, the poem was not only a potent critique of American mass media culture and consumerism, it also intended to inspire people to take material action for Black liberation. It can be argued that by appropriating Scott-Heron’s sentence structure as a rhetorical strategy, the meme appropriates the language of revolutionary Black art and sanitizes the art of its original political aims. So, though it can be engaging to employ certain popularized cultural art/language for rhetorical purposes, one must also weigh the responsibility of giving credit where it’s due (assuming one concludes it is ethical to extract from culturally-specific art to begin with). This is particularly relevant given that both academia and mainstream American media have historically whitewashed the intellectual and cultural contributions of Black and Indigenous people, Scott-Heron in this case. Public-facing education of any discipline should make room to honor the artistic and scholarly traditions of intersectional identities – whether this level of nuance is above memes’ pay grade remains to be seen.