Oh hello darling and welcome back to another installment of New Season month. Feel the joy of a fresh spring breeze as I bring you content that will reinvigorate and refresh you ready for the next season of the year.
Now seems like the perfect time for a little bit of spring cleaning, but I am not talking about getting the duster and the pledge out. This is is a digital spring clean! Which is probably more necessary than you think. Social media users on average spend 2 hours and 23 minutes per day on social media, that's nearly 17 hours a week.
Just out of interest, how many Instagram accounts do you follow?
Go and check now, and then come back…
I hadn't ever thought about it, that was until I saw the wonderful Charlotte Moore's story about Instagram's new feature showing you the accounts that were least and most interacted with. Thank you so much Charlotte, this has shaken up the way I interact with Instagram.
Your content doesn't affect what is shown in your feed, but instead, it's the interactions you have with other accounts. Over time you begin to see a very thin selection of what the algorithms think you want to see.
It might seem a little unnecessary, but as with everything I share with you, there is a point to this! In recent months my relationship with Instagram has felt very intense, and it had become a 24/7 scroll and shop. I looked through the accounts I was following, and it was stuffed full of brands I am sure at some point I thought was a good idea to follow.
With this feature, you can quite easily go through those lists, 50 accounts at a time, and quite easily spring clean your social media. Unlike just going through your following list and doing a mass unfollow, using this feature in moderation does not seem to hurt Instagram's feelings, and I have managed to unfollow over 1000 accounts that were taking up space in my feed without having actions blocked by the evil master of numbers (Facebook's programming!).
You have no idea how nice it is to see the things I truly want to see. I have boosted this process by going through the least interacted with section and engaged with the accounts I want to see content from. I have done all this in the spare 20 minutes or so I get in a day, it's been a gradual process, but it feels healthy.
There is an artful catch 22 with social media, especially Instagram. We are all fully aware of the negative aspects and impacts this piece of software can have, but yet we are all still using it, and more than ever before. I miss the days when it was genuinely harmless fun to use Instagram, and whilst we are all still mindful of what we post, there is no reason why we can't spring clean our way back to a more us-centric version of the app.
It makes perfect sense, as so many of us put so much effort into curating our outputs, why wouldn't we want to curate what we get to see in return. It's cathartic, and rewarding, its a nice chance to be reminded of all the wonderful humans out there in the world. My Instagram has gone from feeling like being trapped in a hot room in a heatwave, to a divine Saturday afternoon stroll in the spring sunshine.
With a little effort from us, we can all make the digital spaces we engage with, just that little bit brighter. With the way the world is at the moment, this seems like a very worthwhile tactic to make our lives more enjoyable!
Thank you as always for joining me today, New Season month will continue next week, until then get spring cleaning!
Images shot by Rachel Pechey
My lewk this week comes from pieces from my wardrobe, and are all old or sold out, just use this outfit as inspiration instead!