An Instagram page where the user has hidden their entire photo grid. This trend is led by younger members, who are increasingly concerned about their privacy.
NPR
hide caption
toggle caption
NPR
An Instagram page where the user has hidden their entire photo grid. This trend is led by younger members, who are increasingly concerned about their privacy.
NPR
Not long ago, Los Angeles music producer Jacob Giancola hid all the photos on his Instagram profile.
It wasn’t exactly a revolutionary act, but his friends quickly took note.
“When people asked me, ‘You’re so mysterious, why do you do that?’ I just say, ‘I like the feeling of privacy, I guess,'” Giancola, 28, said.
He is not the only one.
This is something that has become so prevalent on Instagram that I decided to call it Grid Zero.
For these users, and there are many of them, the Instagram grid – traditionally the domain of documenting life stages and Majorca getaways – has become something else: a deliberate blank slate.
Meta’s Kim Garcia, who researches cultural trends on Instagram, said in an interview that Grid Zero is indeed a growing phenomenon. And it’s led primarily by Gen Z.
“They totally have this almost aversion to permanence and digital footprints,” Garcia said. “Gez Z is growing up in this very public time. They don’t have the same private spaces to explore, or be weird, or discover themselves, that older generations, like me as a millennial, did growing up.”
Of course, Millennials grew up documenting their lives online. But a new era of social media oversaturation, thanks to TikTok, Snapchat, Instagram Stories and various other apps, has given Gen Z far fewer moments to escape the ever-present glare of being publicly publicized on social media.
Instagram’s Garcia said they use the app a lot, just more discreetly than their older peers.
“They are evolving very quickly and evolving themselves every day,” Garcia said. “They don’t want all of this to be public all the time.”
Grid Zero in response to “digital dependence”
The move away from the Instagram grid has been increasing for years.
Instagram chief Adam Mosseri said recently that the platform had diverted resources from other parts of the platform to direct messaging.
This, he explained, is because the biggest areas of growth have been DMs and Stories, which are temporary posts that appear prominently within the app.
The Instagram feed of grid photos has gone out of fashion for some time with younger users.
“If you look at how teens spend their time on Instagram, they spend more time in DMs than in Stories, and they spend more time in Stories than in Feeds,” Mosseri said on the 20VC podcast.
Along with the network’s decline in popularity, more people have ended their network’s existence.
But de-feeding your feed doesn’t mean spending less time on Instagram; it just means you’re probably scrolling through stories or messaging your friends – choosing fleeting or private interactions over permanence on social media.
Snapchat and BeReal have understood this change in preference for a long time.
Instagram said younger users continue to use fake Instagram accounts, also known as “finsta” or “dump accounts,” to share posts with a tighter group of friends, often only after creating their main Grid Zero profile.
It’s a way of regaining some control, by refusing to expose your past. It’s a design choice. Embrace negative space. Make the anti-brand the brand.
“I feel like humanity’s immune system is attacking some of this digital addiction,” said Cassandra Marketos, a digital strategist based in Los Angeles.
It is also, according to Marketos, a form of self-protection.
“I think at this point we’ve seen enough stuff taken from people’s pasts, once they became unexpectedly famous, that it’s a little scary to have a long digital tail trailing behind you,” she said. “And people just want to be more buttoned-up than before.”
Has the IG grid become “cheugy”?
Instagram wouldn’t quantify exactly how much Grid Zero is up.
Those who do, however, say the reasons vary. Of course, if you’ve decided to go with Grid Zero, you may be a private person not trying to advertise the move, so you may not want your name included here .
“No enthusiasm for posting, I guess,” one user said. “I got weird about privacy,” said another Gen Z user, explaining why she hid her entire grid. Someone else who noticed the trend explained it this way: “Caring about an “aesthetic” food is “Cheugy”? – using a word popular with Gen Z to describe someone who is unfashionable or trying too hard. “The less you care, the cooler you are.”
When some Gen Z users are posting on their Instagram feeds, some do it sneakily, Meta’s Garcia said.
“Basically what we’re seeing is they’ll post on IG and immediately archive that post after it goes live, and then they’ll remove it from their archives a few days later,” she said. “So it doesn’t show up on your friends’ feeds, but it shows up on your grid, almost like a little Easter egg.”
In other words, only add a photo to your Instagram profile if no one knows about it.
For some Grid Zero followers, there is another factor: how shrouding your social media footprint in a certain mystery can attract attention, place you slightly out of reach, and perhaps make you more desirable or interesting than the guy whose flow goes all the way back. to the first Obama administration.
“Intrigue seems so rare these days,” said Marketos, the Los Angeles digital strategist, “that when you encounter it, you are like a man in the desert who has found water.”
A version of this story first appeared on A thinga sub-stack devoted to cultural observations and the Internet.
NPR News
