They colonised Facebook. Then they discovered emoji, and boy did they start to deploy them. Now, parents in midlife and upwards have come for Instagram — potentially threatening its kudos and all that it stands for.
When social media historians look back, they may pinpoint Sir Mick Jagger as the man who brought about the beginning of the end; the Gavrilo Princip of Instagram’s decline, if you will. Sir Mick, who at 74 has managed to remain on the right side of tragic for longer than anyone thought possible, has shown us that even he is not infallible. For proof, look no further than the Insta feed of his 19-year-old son, Lucas. It is here, buried among the many comments on the teenager’s pictures, that Jagger has exposed his “embarrassing dad” side.
“Looks like fun. Ha!” he writes beside a photo of his son posing in sunglasses. “Watch out for the water,” he jokes — hilariously — on a picture of Lucas paddling in the surf. “Cool pic,” he observes about another. Cool pic? Is this some kind of joke? We’re talking about the man who, for more than half a century, has been a rock ‘n’ roller. If even he can’t help himself writing cringey dad comments on his son’s social media, then what hope for mere mortal fathers?
More pertinently, however, what hope is there for Instagram? The reason we ask is that the three stages of cool are well-established: first, the thing in question (fashion trend, music genre, website, whatever) starts off as niche, preferably subversive and countercultural, too. Then, as it gains in popularity and profile, its cutting edge appeal swiftly and predictably diminishes. Finally, it becomes so mainstream that you’ve started to wonder what the fuss is about and before you know it you have signed up yourself, much to your children’s dismay. For them, thereafter, it’s game over; the cultural moment has passed; the thing that was niche becomes ubiquitous — and if they care about retaining their street cred, your kids will sell up, get out and move on, quick.
So when fathers of a certain age get involved — even those like Sir Mick, with more panache than your average — it’s rarely a good sign. Start me up? He could be more likely to finish it off, if we’re speaking of Insta’s prized youth appeal.
But we mustn’t lay all this at poor Sir Mick’s feet. Lest we forget, Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, has been doing her bit to make Insta uncool. When her youngest daughter Eugenie got engaged in January, she could barely contain herself, expressing her joy in a remarkable outburst of saccharine posts. “They make laughter and we feel the joy,” read the stomach-churning caption on one picture of the couple. “Thank you for the magic, Jack and Eugie. So proud of you.”
Then there’s Keith Richards, who’s also betrayed his less raucous side in a series of (actually rather adorable) posts to his daughter, Theodora, 33.
“Theo, break a leg!” he wrote before she interviewed Sean Lennon for her own music podcast last year. “Have a great chat with Sean. Love you darling Dad. PS. Hi Sean.” Which is either very sweet, or another big nail in the coffin for the platform. But does it really all herald grim tidings for Instagram?
We’ve witnessed what happened to Facebook. One minute, your kids had profiles — but you didn’t really know what they were for. Then you signed yourself up, just to have a peek, and before they’d had time to evacuate, you were peppering your children’s every photo with comments.
For them it was a steep learning curve; having to think twice before posting that picture of their friend straddling a statue, wearing only their underwear and glugging from a bottle. After all, Auntie Pat might be looking.
As social media commentator Zoe Cairns notes: “Youngsters try to stick to the platforms where their parents aren’t hanging out, so they can share pictures of what they’ve been up to at the weekend, but what happens is when that social media platform becomes a trend, their parents think ‘let’s join it.’ They hear their children and grandchildren talking about it and want to be in on the conversation. Young people then start to look for the next best thing and for platforms where their parents aren’t hanging out.”
In 2015, 11 years after the launch of Facebook, The Washington Post reported that teens were “leaving Facebook in droves for new friends like Instagram, Snapchat and Twitter — at an estimated rate of up to a million a year”. The reason? “It’s hard to look cool when you’re hanging out with Mom and Dad.”
If older generations take over Instagram, that surely sounds its death knell? Cairns doesn’t think so. “Instagram is good because it’s a neutral platform, where we can go and escape. With Facebook, we don’t know if we can trust everything we read on there.”
And judging by research released this week by the Pew Research CentRE, she may have a point: some 72 per cent of US teens say they use the platform, compared with 51 per cent of 13- to 17-year-olds who use Facebook, and 69 per cent on Snapchat. Plus, a change in the way youngsters use social media could guarantee the longevity of Instagram — even once it’s populated by their parents and grandparents.
“The social media environment among teens is quite different from what it was just three years ago,” says research associate Monica Anderson, the lead author of the Pew report. “Back then, teens’ social media use mostly revolved around Facebook. Today, their habits revolve less around a single platform.”
So if young people are no longer confined to one online space, but flit between a few like social media butterflies, there are greater opportunities for them to carve out their own protected patches — away from their parents’ prying eyes. For better or worse, there’s a corner of the internet for everything, including mums and dads.
It is a broad church — and one whose original members, so far, seem willing to tolerate the throwing open of its doors to all-comers. Then again, today’s youngsters can hardly object. They are, let’s remember, a generation willing to share their whole lives with the world. Today’s kids of Instagram live to put it all out there. And in this brave new ultra-confessional world, even embarrassing parents are welcome.
— The Telegraph Group Limited, London 2018
Rosa Silverman is feature writer at The Daily Telegraph.
