We’re two decades in to the great social media experiment, and it should come as no surprise to anyone that things aren’t going particularly well. Periodically we’re all reminded of the ways that social media is making us unhappy: addictive behaviors, fear of missing out, unfair life comparisons, and the fact that your PawPaw has revealed himself to be a shockingly vehement bigot.
“We should never have taught our parents to use computers,” one wit opined in the comments section of a conspiracy-theory-laden Facebook post that came to my attention the other day. I pretty much agree, but I also think that my generation (geriatric millennials, because yes, that’s a thing now) and the younger generations that inhabit the online hiker-trash world need to take a hard look at how we are using our social media platform of choice–Instagram.
If the outdoor industry had set out to create a social media platform from scratch, they’d have a hard time coming up with something better suited to their needs than Instagram–although it should go without saying that if the outdoor industry had invented Instagram, it would cost $250 and you’d have to replace it every 300 miles or so.
In any case, Instagram is a perfect way to sell expensive things to reasonably fit and attractive people by showing them pictures of reasonably fit and attractive people wearing expensive things in beautiful places. So-called lifestyle shoots are the bread and butter of outdoor brands on Instagram, though lately, savvy social-media marketers have taken to using Instagram’s Stories function to repost gear layouts and other user-generated content. Why spend money on shoots when users will give you content in exchange for a squirt of dopamine when their follower count goes up? The incentive to tag brands in posts is high on Instagram, because you will likely get reposted or mentioned by accounts with thousands, if not millions, of followers.
Then the users repost that reposted story to their own story, thus giving the brand a little more free advertising. Some brands even leverage their supply chain issues into motivation to follow their accounts–you have to follow them to get an inside scoop on when the next round of sleeping bag liners are going to drop.
The upshot of all this is that you might start out on Instagram following your hiker friends and end up swimming in a sea of brand content fairly quickly. This is, after all, how social media makes money. Instagram is not the product–people are the product that Instagram is selling to brands to help them sell things to people.
Influencers and brand ambassadors are an arguably even seedier side of Insta. I don’t think either of these categories of people actively sets out to be disingenuous or misleading–at least at first. These are often folks who have discovered a way to make some money from a thing they love (in this case, hiking and backpacking) and it’s hard to begrudge them that. But they are being used by brands in a very real sense, and most of them know it, and most of them are OK with it because it allows them to go backpacking more without having to worry about having a real job.
Influencers and brand ambassadors tend to repeat dubious brand and product claims verbatim, lending a veneer of respectability to an industry already rife with overblown performance claims. Legally these accounts and the people behind them are required to disclose their relationships with brands and indicate when content is sponsored, but it doesn’t always happen and can be hard to notice when it does (and sometimes the relationships are unofficial, which is even ickier). As a final nail in the coffin, influencers often don’t have anything interesting to say. Aldo Leopold, Henry David Thoreau, Edward Abbey, and Terry Tempest Williams they are most certainly not. Hell, they aren’t even Cheryl Strayed or Bill Bryson. You’re lucky if you get a semi-coherent rambling about how nice it is to be in the woods, which, yeah, we get it.
All of which is to say, if you are a heavy user of Instagram and you follow a lot of hiker accounts and brands, you are being sold things you likely don’t need more or less constantly–and often not even by professional salespeople. And chances are you are OK with that, because as we pretty much all know that’s sometimes the cost of being on the internet and/or the price of living in society where capitalism has advanced to the point that characters in car insurance commercials have deep, well-fleshed out backstories.
But I’d ask you to consider if other niche corners of Instagram have the same problem (hint: some of them, a lot of them even, don’t). I’m an artist, and I’m here to tell you that the artsy folks on Instagram mostly don’t feel the need to create free content for paint and paper manufacturers by constantly tagging brands when showing off a new painting. I’d ask you to think about why that is, and if giving brands (many of whom are huge, relatively evil corporations) free advertising is really worth the extra followers or happy-juice-feelings you’ll get out of it.
There’s a final and more hard-to-pin-down side of all this that I feel like I should mention–at the risk of treading in grumpy old man territory (I’m 36). Hiker Instagram certainly creates the fear of missing out that we’ve all been warned about in social-media-related think-pieces. But it also creates a sense that the only thing one should care about is hiking or backpacking. Influencers and brand ambassadors tailor their accounts with razor sharp precision. It’s Influencing 101–focus your content.
It’s all hiking, all the time, and that just isn’t how most of us can (or should, or want to) live our lives. Writing and thinking about backpacking is my profession, but it’s also my hobby, of which I have roughly a dozen–on purpose– because I believe that human beings should have a variety of experiences. I don’t want to be hiking or backpacking all the time–nor do I find it particularly fun to hang out with people who only think and talk about backpacking. Sometimes I want to paint, sometimes I want to read on the sofa, sometimes I want to chill with my cat on the front porch, sometimes I want to paddle around on a lake, sometimes I want to ride my mountain bike. And yet I find myself feeling guilty for not always being on a hike or backpacking trip–usually, after I’ve just finished a scroll on the ‘gram.
Maybe it’s different for you. Maybe you can follow a bunch of brands, hiking celebrities, content creators, brand ambassadors, and your trail family from your 2013 thru-hike and not feel overwhelmed by feelings of inadequacy, fear of missing out, and boredom from looking at some version of the same 10 photographs over and over again (my favorite is the “blond woman wrapped in heavy blanket drinks coffee and looks out over a canyon at sunrise” photo).
Maybe you can read poorly punctuated, phone-typed paragraphs of semi-philosophical ramblings on “the importance of like, just being out here in my happy place, you know?” without feeling a creeping blend of depression, boredom, and rage seeping in around the corners of your eyeballs.
But I’ve realized I can’t, and I’m here to say that I’m much happier now that I’ve cut all those accounts out of my internet life. Despite the fact that keeping a finger on the pulse of backpacking culture is part of my job, I follow exactly one outdoor account, that of Gary the Adventure Cat, because Gary wears goggles to protect his sensitive little cat eyes and takes naps pretty much wherever he feels like it–on top of mountains, in kayaks, and on his owner’s shoulders as both of them participate in downhill skiing. Gary, being a cat, doesn’t give a damn about if I’m following him or not. Gary doesn’t sell me stuff. Gary isn’t interested in compromising himself for the promise of free gear or free publicity.
That’s the kind of internet content I’m here for.
