Are You Experiencing Posting Ennui?

The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need, or even the responsibility, to make public for anyone online to see. Posting a picture of what you ate on a given morning was something we did during the early years of Twitter and Instagram, and at the time it felt novel: suddenly, you could share the most mundane moments of your life with a crowd of waiting strangers who might just be excited to see them. In a way, the breakfast photo represented the utopian dream of social media: billions of average people could throw fragments of their lives onto the internet with little mediation—their meals, their pets, their shower thoughts—and it would turn into something not only engaging but vital, a dynamic record of reality from the ground level. To post, and to interact with others’ posts, was to participate in a grand project that valorized amateurism, banality, and a sort of content-based meritocracy: anyone and anything could be interesting, and even go viral, if only you posted it the right way.