Social media apps: I can find a point to most of them, if I bend it to my own will. Facebook I can use to keep up with certain obscure hobbies, Twitter I can use to mock breaking news on rioters, Pinterest I can use to store pictures to study (not cupcakes or bent penises before you ask). Blogs have their point – I can say fuck and soapy tit wank, and the whole world can read it if they’ve nothing better to do.
But there’s one app I absolutely despise with a passion usually reserved for the films of Eli Roth. Fucking Instagram.
In a dark, dark wood there was a dark, dark house. In the dark, dark house was a dark, dark room. And in the dark, dark room there was a pillock with a camera wafting a Polaroid image in the vague hope it would turn into a masterpiece of photography. Instead it’s an orange and brown out of focus shot of you and your sibling sat in your brown and orange living room, probably with a chocolate gateau, or cheese and pineapple on a stick. You’ll probably have cords, a bowl cut and a terrible jumper that Noel Edmonds would happily kill you for.
Seventies photography was shit. No-one looks at seventies photos with happiness. All you remember is the flash bulb that blinded you for 20 minutes or the memory of that dirty basement where Uncle Pete told you to get changed into your swimming costume. So why would anyone invent a heaving pile of app dung that takes clear images and turns them into a brown seventies mush?
Hipsters. Hipsters with social media followers they have never met. About a year ago some cock I know started posting Instagram pictures on his news feed every two hours. Of beer. Or a glass of wine. Selfies in a bar. I’m of an age that I know what a glass of beer looks like, and I can even remember how it looked in the seventies: pretty much the same. This grainy, distorted image is not clever or arty – it is fucking brown. Coffee, chestnut, sepia, sienna, copper, rust, BROWN.
Fifty shades of the fucking thing does not make something attractive. You’ve basically put a filter on to make it look old and shit. You might as well wear flares, nylon and waltz about drinking Babycham.
Still the pictures flood my news feed. “Here we are at a party, doesn’t it look great all smudgey.” Nope, ‘fraid not, you look like wankers. “Oooh look we’re in the countryside; don’t these leaves look great in sepia?” Wait for Autumn you bellend. The Instagram app seems to make these clowns feel they’re artistically retro, and yet current. It is zeitgeist.
Pass the sick bowl.
And above all, it’s the choice of subjects – so incredibly boring. Who the hell wants to see a grainy picture of your cat, some food you’ve paid too much for in a restaurant, or your mates attempting to do impressions of Kanye West?
No-one with half an ounce of sanity. But I’ll say this: it has one use. I now use it as a way to cull my Facebook friends, so separate the multi-coloured wheat from the brown, brown chaff. If you use Instagram, you’re clearly past the point of no return and deserve a good culling, among other things.