How Instagram is killing our contemplative experience

By rushing to take selfies, we could well lose the ability to let our thoughts blend into a landscape or a work of art.


You are on a magnificent beach. The sea is turquoise blue, it sparkles under the white rays of the morning sun. A myriad of silver flashes, whose undulating rhythm is music to the eyes. You let yourself be lulled by this rhythm, and by the regular lapping of the waves. The gaze plunges into the distance, into the darker horizon line. It widens, as if your field of vision is wider. Your heart opens. You feel great well-being, under these rays which warm you. When next to you, a person taking a selfie catches your eye and pulls you out of your contemplative experience.


Until then, you had integrated the conversations, the noises, the movements of the clusters of tourists who, like you, were enjoying the beach, but now, suddenly, this image destroys your connection with this place. It takes you back to yourself, to your body, to your phone that you might have forgotten for a moment. The moment is shattered, the delicious absorption of the self into the landscape has vanished.


I have had the experience I have just described dozens of times this summer. It's impossible to go to a somewhat touristy place without seeing clusters of tourists posing for Instagram-ready photos. Often, too often, this vision of the staging had the effect of destroying part of my happiness by extracting me from my contemplation. As the trip progressed, this feeling, when it recurred, depressed me more and more.



Ability to be absorbed

The climax was reached when, right on cue when I was having these thoughts, someone asked me “to take a photo of her for Instagram”. It was the worst thing to say to me at that moment. I really had the impression at the time that I was definitely not made for this century, and that I would have to exile myself to another era. Or that I stop at tourist places (which is certainly easier to do, I grant you).

And if this depresses me, it is not only for me, but because I sense all that this could, I believe, imply for the evolution of humanity (yes, just that). And this, of course, goes beyond Instagram, selfies and leisurely vacations, to more broadly affect our ability to let ourselves be absorbed by any experience, in the era of connected living.


Forgetting yourself, chasing away the flow of thoughts and the many things of practical life provides great well-being. Anyone who has done a little yoga or meditation feels it, knows it vaguely. What a joy to immerse yourself in reading, and only look up several hours later, as if unphased by this apnea dive. Read until you completely forget the notion of time, place, so absorbed is your mind in other lands. Contemplation makes one deeply happy and happy.


Instagram compresses the aesthetic experience

“Contemplation, throughout the Aristotelian and Platonic tradition, is a totally intellectual and interior activity,” explains Anne-Lise Worms , lecturer at the University of Rouen and specialist in the philosopher. It is the activity where the soul is alone with itself, where it is pure spirit. This is what we can feel in front of the sea, or when we are in front of music: we then abstract ourselves from all external realities. True contemplation “cannot be shared, it is truly an individual experience”, believes Anne-Lise Worms.


“He who sees must have made himself related and similar to what is seen, in order to achieve contemplation. Certainly, the eye would never see the sun without having become of the same nature as the sun, and the soul could not see beauty without having become beautiful ,” writes (1) the philosopher Plotinus (3rd century AD). But how can we become one with the sun or beauty, if we are drawn outside of ourselves each time? Or if we have taken the habit, through mimicry, of immediately sharing everything we experience?


“If I pass by a table, I’m not going to stop. But if I pass by a table made of roses, I will be struck, I will look. And then I'll think about it. Then synthesize these two things: experience and reflection. And there is an aesthetic experience from the moment it has impacted our temporality, in these three times. But Instagram compresses these three times, through a narcissistic temptation where the subject refuses to suspend his presence, his ego. It is this generosity in the aesthetic act that has disappeared in Instagram ,” adds Igor Galligo, researcher in aesthetics at EHESS and in critical media theory at IXDM, in Switzerland, who speaks of a “crisis of aesthetic experience .


“Our times are not at all conducive to contemplation. We turn away from this silent, purely reflective activity, from this gaze detached from material contingencies, where thought floats, regrets the philosopher specializing in Plotinus. It's a form of catastrophe, most people can no longer be alone with themselves. And there is no need to do philosophy: we all have an inner life, and we pay less and less attention to it.


“Instagrammable” restaurants with attractive colors

We can wonder if we are not now missing the essential: the thing contemplated. Or the thing eaten, food being another form of experience that can also fully absorb you. This was recently explained in an article by Gurvan Kristanadjaja, in Libération : “We choose a restaurant less and less for what we have on the plate, more and more for its aesthetics” . Staging each moment of their life has taken on such importance for some that they flock en masse to “Instagrammable” restaurants with attractive colors. These restaurants themselves have understood that the stakes have shifted, and are less concerned with the quality of their dishes than with the surrounding decor. “I sometimes receive messages from people who ask me for advice on starting their restaurant. They first talk to me about their communication before describing to me the dishes they have on the menu ,” says Cathy Closier, who founded the Season restaurant in the 3rd arrondissement of Paris, in the same article.


Another example: in certain concerts, we now see more and more people almost constantly with their arms in the air, and at the end of their arm, obviously... a telephone. Why not watch this concert directly afterwards on video, on one of the many platforms that will broadcast it, rather than spoiling a unique and ephemeral experience by capturing it?


Same at the museum. “A friend went to the Louvre recently to see the Mona Lisa, she was surprised because everyone had their backs to the painting (to take a photo, editor’s note). Five or six years ago, no one turned their back on the Mona Lisa ,” observes researcher Francis Eustache, specialist in neuropsychology and director of an Inserm unit. “Everything is spectacle, so there is no more authenticity. We were already saying that in the 1960s, with Guy Debord, but the spectacle continues to be everywhere ,” explains Yves Citton, professor of French literature at Stendhal University in Grenoble, who published For an ecology of attention ( Threshold, 2014).


I'm not talking here about those who have elevated mobile photography and video to the level of art. One of my former teachers, Richard Koci Hernandez, is a master at this. You can admire his photos on Instagram , and for that, this application is a gem. Because she made her poetic creations accessible to as many people as possible, like those of many other photographers, activists, poets, and other crazy people, without whom life would really lack salt. But the productions of apprentice holiday photographers do not bring anything revolutionary, often using big strings (the insta_repeat account laughs with delight…).


They're certainly quite pretty, and it's great to see that so many people are interested in photography, but it's also sad that it has to cost us some or all of our contemplative experience.


What are we losing?

I immediately see some people exclaim: “But Madam, it may not be your pleasure, but it may be that of others!” Certainly, perhaps not everyone lacks the contemplative experience, and it would be dictatorial to want to impose a single model of happiness. Except that the very strong presence of smartphone cameras everywhere has consequences on our creative faculties, and perhaps even on our intelligence.


Because these are immediately connected to what we call the “default mode” network, explains Francis Eustache, who directed a collective work published at the start of the 2018 school year entitled La Mémoire au futur (Éditions Le Pommier): “The Things happen very quickly, so as scientists we are hampered because we lack data, studies that follow cohorts of people. It's difficult to have control groups because we are all invaded by these external digital memories. But we know that we make what we call the “default mode” network work less and less when we leave our thoughts behind. And it is the network which underlies our journey into phantasmagoria, and which also allows us to synthesize our knowledge, our lived experiences.


Other thinkers go further, asserting that it is our intelligence itself that could be shriveled by these permanent interruptions. This is the thesis of Nicholas Carr, in an article published in June 2008 in the magazine The Atlantic : “Previously, immersing myself in a book or a long article posed no problem for me. My mind was caught up in the narration or the construction of the argument, and I would spend hours letting myself be carried away by long pieces of prose. This is rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration starts to fade after two or three pages. I get restless, I lose track, I look for something else to do. I feel like I'm always forcing my stubborn brain back to the text. Deep reading, which used to be natural, has become a struggle.”


The poison and the cure

At a time when attention destroyers are gaining ground, we find more and more resistance fighters, attracted by meditation, yoga, disconnection or “ digital detox ”, “ slow management ”, “slow food”, or even “ slow sex ”. Some artists have made it their field of exploration, within what we call the “arts of presence”. Igor Galligo, the researcher interviewed above, for example, presented an attentional focusing device during one of his exhibitions, entitled Cosmetics of Indistinction . “I had the feeling that people came there to be able to have a drink in an ephemeral setting. And I wanted to inhibit their narcissistic temptation and force them to make themselves available.” He had applied an “anti-narcissism cream” to his face, and encouraged spectators to do the same.


For my part, I was lucky eight years ago to come across a performance by the artist Marina Abramović, The Artist is Present , at Moma in New York . Incredible experience, in which the artist plunges his eyes into those of strangers, sparking with this simple thing an extraordinary journey into the recesses of the soul, with a tool as sober as it is powerful (try watching in any one of your friends in the eye, even if only for a full minute, and see...).


We are not completely lost! As Yves Citton says, “the remedy and the poison emerge at the same time. There is potential for emancipation in this development, the reaction is healthy. We can speak of dialectics, or dynamics, rather than a catastrophe.