The newest issue of PLAT Journal, "7.0: Sharing," concerns the nature of contemporary sharing that proceeds today with fervor, given the prevalence of social media and screen technologies. 

Phillip Denny, currently a PhD student in History & Theory of Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, published his article, "Instagram ergo sum,” in the latest issue of PLAT Journal. It is both a critique and a missive to the social media platform that binds architects most closely, as it pressures the members of its field to express themselves through an oversharing of what might be their 'greatest hits.'

Instagram ergo sum

By Phillip Denny

“T.M.I.,” they exclaim. Their counterpart has revealed too much, and in doing so, has become too familiar. In declaring “too much information” they register their disgust. An embarrassment of information has been brought forth — simply too much. This is an instance of “oversharing,” the presentation of an excess of data, often of a personal nature. That is, a surplus of facts with no use-value. (But perhaps some exchange-value: gossip is valuable precisely for its propensity to circulate, after all.) T.M.I. It is simply more than she wants to know. 

If “information overload” is the phenomenon whereby one receives more information than we know what to do with (e.g., “There’s too much to know”) then T.M.I. is its affective complement. T.M.I. registers a desire that motivates knowing in the first place, or in this case, a desire not to know at all. T.M.I. is a verbal defense mechanism, a shorthand insistence on protecting a private interior discourse, that storehouse of potentially embarrassing facts held apart and away from a public face. Declaring “T.M.I.” stops a flow of data and suppresses the informational offensive. The term is a device of social etiquette, one that reinstates the limit, momentarily breached, of acceptable data transfer. T.M.I. pauses the overload. Of course, nobody says T.M.I. anymore, a phrase devised to combat the oversharers of Generation X.

The cultural praxis of my generation, the first cohort to come of age on the Internet, is properly informational. Indeed, ours is a generation predominantly defined — from the outside — by its oversharing. Claimants of a prevailing generational narcissism point to common habits. We broadcast on several platforms at once, managing multiple personas only abstractedly related to a living, breathing originary self. Photographs of meals, pets, and vacations create a digital, scrollable pool in which to gaze upon ourselves. “Social media,” more than media for being social, are infrastructures that produce social beings. In excess of what Hannah Arendt ever imagined, today’s nominal individual emerges doggedly from the laboring in the digital-social morass. According to media theorist John Durham Peters, contemporary life takes place within, and as a product of “a communication environment in which media have become equipment for living in a more fundamental way.” In the epoch of the sharing economy, sharing is living.

What, then, of the “oversharer”? In the course of living, he produces a stream of unsolicited information: photographs, screenshots, images, texts, articles, connections, friends and followers, and an innumerable quantity of likes and affirmations. The traces of this labor form an inexhaustible trail of digital breadcrumbs that weaves across places and platforms like so many forking paths. Digital life is a performative information potlatch: The act of sharing is the display of all that one has to share in the same moment that it is a performance of altruism. Inevitably, sharing bolsters status in the sharing economy.

But what does all of this mean for architecture? If sharing is living, what does the architect have to give? Instagram, the preferred platform for many designers, is one place to seek an answer, chock-full of breadcrumbs. The Instagram feeds of architects, which inevitably feature images of their own work, suggest that their shared professional preoccupation is the production and dissemination of images, as some augurs of a “post-orthographic” era have recently and persuasively argued. Alternately, we could contend that the image here functions as a means to an end, rather than the end itself. The interactions of users with architects’ images on Instagram suggests that the architect’s greater preoccupation is with the production and cultivation of audiences, not images. As Michael Meredith of MOS Architects (@mmmosarchitects) recently said of architecture’s global, online discourse, “Within the chatter, micronetworks are cultivated in intimate exchanges of images and words. (So-and-so sent a post.) Social niches and enclaves encourage a tribalism. (So-and-so started following you.) These are “imagined communities” (and real ones) …” Simply put, sharing produces communities.

In fact, Instagram is where this author happened across the question that prompted the present writing. @cyruspenarroyo, an Instagram acquaintance, recently asked, “Is there a line between knowledge production and self-promotion?” (This hypothetical line of demarcation is precisely that boundary which might have once elicited cries of T.M.I.) But to get to the heart of the matter, and perhaps to offer a response, I would propose a slight reconfiguration of the parts to ask, “Is there a line between knowledge promotion and self-production?” To update Descartes: Instagram ergo sum.

Social media platforms like Instagram reconfigure the terms of sociality, mixing knowledge production with self-promotion in the practice of circulating information. These acts of sharing promote knowledge at the same time that they produces selves vis-à-vis authorship. For the architect, the Instagrammatic production of the author is in fact first a function of producing an audience (and reciprocally, the audience is produced as an effect of sharing information.) Audience-building on Instagram thus functions according to the Gen X logic of Field of Dreams (1989): If you share it, they will come.

Mine is a generation of oversharers and oversharing architects, surely, but who decides when “so much” becomes “too much”? T.M.I. might be an anachronistic phrase precisely not because it is old and worn, but because the sheer volume of information with which we contend daily is no longer an issue in itself; rather, contemporary social practices, etiquettes, and behaviors demand reinserting the self into the information deluge. If “networking” was the first social practice to cast interpersonal relationships as abstract topologies linking human nodes, then net-work is the Sisyphean labor of managing and promoting the “self” (Node 1) in the system. It is this net-work that is both knowledge promotion and self-production: the sharing of “work in progress,” the posting of personal updates, the maintenance of correspondence, and the rest. In this fundamentally informational milieu, social practices like “ghosting,” “leaving someone on read,” or even “unplugging” become instruments of information management at the same time that they modulate the appearance (and disappearance) of the individual in the network. 

Today, “leaving on read” signals that, like Herman Melville’s Bartleby, “I would prefer not to.” These practices are forms of refusal, offering resistance to the terms of transactional and workaday sharing. At the same time, these refusals threaten to disconnect the individual from the discourse. The socially-produced presence of the author holds only so long as their posts appear in the feed as so many digital utterances. As @cyruspenarroyo asked, “Is work even relevant if it doesn’t have an Instagram presence?” Perhaps not, but is an architect even relevant if he or she doesn’t have an Instagram presence? Indeed, sharing is inextricably caught up with being: To share or not to share, that is the question. Now, have I shared too much, or too little?

PLAT 7.0 is now available at Archinect Outpost, our retail store in Downtown Los Angeles, located at 900 E. 4th Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013.

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