I Wish My Friends Would Stop Sending Me Instagram Reels

Or: Friendship in the age of the algorithm

Oh, the horrors!

I feel an overbearing sense of responsibility when a friend sends me more than three Instagram reels in a row. Oftentimes, I open the messages just to close them and reassure myself that I’ll go through all of them at once when they’ve piled up. The unacknowledged reels occupy a space in my mind, tense knowing that I have failed to fulfill a hallmark friendship duty of the 2020s: Replying to a reel, a meme, or a Tiktok, that my friend asserts is a representation of them and I.¹

I am sure they mean their best when they send a reel captioned “us,” or a tweet with “This reminded me of you,” but I can’t help the feeling that this friendship-motivated reel-and-Tiktok-sending does very little for our relationship. It serves, almost, like a placeholder for the real motions of connection. But why has the empty routine of content exchange become commonplace in many modern relationships? Of course I had to write this essay to elucidate my feelings, mostly because I don’t want my friends to feel like I’m deliberately leaving them hanging.

The Meme to Reel Pipeline

At some point in our social digital history, it became commonplace for friends to exchange media that entertained. Infamously, this began with memes, contagious pieces of humor that also have the ability to communicate social and political sentiments². Hakoköngäs, Halmesvaara, & Sakki (2020) posited that memes possess the ability to “crystallize” arguments into compact, shareable forms—containing a variety of metaphors or depictions of familiar feelings or scenarios³. Memes often possess emotional components: speaking of or in relation to human sensibilities, to be deciphered through the various signifiers that compose the meme.

Samples of early memes that crystallize complicated “feelings”

In many settings, memes act as a powerful social lubricant (like drugs and alcohol): It allows a person to say things that would be inappropriate otherwise. It would be jarring to blurt “I had fun once… it was awful,” mid-conversation, yet a tastefully captioned Grumpy Cat image perfectly encompasses a familiar, temporary, and lighthearted sort of negativity that is easy to banter off of. Memes simultaneously provide visual and textual shorthand for strong emotions⁴, making it an incredible tool in digital communication. Given its many strengths, memes were never passed around in bulks of hundreds like Tiktoks or Instagram Reels are via the apps’ direct messaging feature. Shortform content, though similar to memes, exists in a completely different context and serves a completely different role in friendship, mostly due to how much there is of it.

Dropping a Tiktok mid-conversation creates far more friction than that of a 2010 meme because a Tiktok is more complicated than a meme. There are various imagery, audio, time-specific circumstances, algorithmic interference, and even allusions to other Tiktoks & trends that complicate the sharing of a clip. This is primarily the reason why platforms that center around user generated content are so successful, because it can cater to every niche. But the many factors that comprise a Tiktok and how the algorithm chooses it to land on your page are what make it difficult to digest in bulk.

Post-Tiktok Alternate Reality Friendship States

In a recent essay, Adam Aleksic describes the activity of scrolling as its very own micro-ritual, further positing that it divides us into two selves, as rituals do: the self you enter whilst being fed by the algorithm and the self you are outside of it. Mindless consumption imposes a barrier between you and the outside world (the kind that brings comfort to scrollers, away from the obstacles of everyday living). He states that this ritual blurs our interpretation of the messaging that a piece of content is trying to provide. We interpret the algorithmic world as if what lies behind it is real and not only an estimate of reality; as if a relatable Tiktok landing on your FYP is all chance and there isn’t a set of intentions, circumstances, parameters, and digital engineering feats that contribute to how you perceive a work.

I’d like to further build on this characterization of the algorithm by extending this concept into the component of friendship that exists online. Typically, to maintain an adult friend, one should at least be connected with them across at least one platform with direct messaging so you can speak. But realistically, to really feel like you are a part of someone’s life you have to do so many things: keep up with their stories, comment on their most recent posts, watch the reels they sent you, maintain a Tiktok streak, et cetera. Part of what makes it so difficult to come off social media is the lingering feeling that you’re missing out on part of your friends’ lives by refusing to participate in the microrituals that “gratify” your friendship.

Yet, I don’t think these microrituals are useless. I enjoy surveilling my friends lives’ on Instagram from time to time and I relish in joy when I am sent a Tiktok that discusses things I’m passionate about. But I’d be delusional to think that these things are adequate replacements for intimacy. A portion of our friendship is fragmented and kept within Tiktok streaks, Instagram DMs, or whatever long exchange of content you and your friends hold—operating as its own machine. When I choose to spend time on Reels, savoring the pleasure of the bright screen and blissfully sending funny videos to my friends, I am missing out on the gifts of life: curiosity, discovery, hope, and the mundane. I am, maybe temporarily, numbing my mind to a degree incompatible with human connection. And that is a terrible disservice to me and everyone I love.

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And that’s it for April, folks! I know it’s kind of cheating because I posted this on the last day of April, but oh well…

Anyway, I had an absolute blast writing this essay. I’d like to thank Adam Aleksic for writing my favorite essays ever this past month. I’ll try to write shorter things more often so there’s more of me out here. I wonder if this post’ll get a little traction!

1. Because I do love you, friend! And I do think of you too when I see media that reminds us of our relationship. But I would much more love to appreciate that media with you alongside you rather than be the recipient of an idea.

2. Wong, E. F., & Holyoak, K. J. (2021). Cognitive and motivational factors driving sharing of internet memes. Memory & Cognition, 49(5), 863–872. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-020-01134-1

3. Hakoköngäs, E., Halmesvaara, O., & Sakki, I. (2020). Persuasion through bitter humor: Multimodal discourse analysis of rhetoric in internet memes of two far-right groups in Finland. Social Media + Society, 6(2), 2056305120921575. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305120921575

4. Is grumpy cat perhaps the precursor to doomerism?