A Vogue writer falls in love with Dispo, the new retro-photo app that brings back the casual, who-cares approach to social media.
Could Dispo Make Social Media Fun Again?
I’ve accumulated many cringe-worthy memories in my lifetime, but let me share a specific one with you. It’s 2017. I’m standing in the limestone streets of Dubrovnik, Croatia. My left foot is placed strategically in front of my right, and I’m staring off into the distance at nothing in particular. A Stepford Wife smile is plastered on my face. “Can you take a few more?” I ask my boyfriend at the time. “I’ve taken, like, a million,” he replies, exasperated. “We’re going to be late for dinner.”
But I’m convinced that we don’t have “it,” whatever “it” is. So I make him stand there and snap for several minutes. Other tourists meander through the frame, and even though it’s a public street in a peak travel season, I’m irrationally frustrated at their presence. Later, we sit at dinner. The sun is setting. The medieval city is bathed in a warm glow, its crumbling walls rosy with the reflection of the water. There’s a bottle of wine on the table, and we’re just about to share a salt-crusted fish, something I’ve never tried before. I ignore all of it. Instead, I sit there with my arms crossed, scrolling through selects on his camera. “Ugh, my dress looks wrinkled,” I pout.
You probably hate me in this story. (It’s okay, I do too.) But you’ve also probably been me. There’s a reason the phrases “doing it for the ’gram” and “doing it for the Vine” (RIP) became part of the cultural lexicon: As we became obsessed with using social media, we also became obsessed with how we presented ourselves on it. We wanted to be forever young despite our inevitable aging. We wanted to be world travelers despite having daily desk jobs. And we kept trudging through this impossible quest of picture-posting perfection even though it was making us miserable: A 2018 study from Psychology Bulletin found that, perhaps thanks partly to social media, college students and 20-somethings held themselves to standards way higher than previous generations. “Raw data suggest that social media use pressures young adults to perfect themselves in comparison to others, which makes them dissatisfied with their bodies and increases social isolation,” the study reports. “Today’s young people are competing with each other in order to meet societal pressures to succeed, and they feel that perfectionism is necessary in order to feel safe, socially connected, and of worth.”
“I know how important flexing for the ’gram is. People always want to show off their life and let others in on the cool parts,” YouTuber and social-media personality David Dobrik tells me over the phone from Los Angeles. He’s pragmatic about it—“That’s never going away,” he says—but also, well, sick of it. “Like, everybody at a concert always wants to take a picture. Yeah, do that, but then enjoy the rest of the concert.”
This story originally appeared on: Vogue - Author:Elise Taylor
