instagram novelty

For a while now there have been two jokes about Instagram pictures that have really been circulating long enough to become very tired by this point.

1. Too many people use the sepia filter and crop their pictures to make them look like they came from the 60s or 70s.
2. Too many people take pictures of their meals. This one isn't limited to Instagram, but it's a recurring joke.

I don't use Instagram, though I could see myself using it at a different stage in life.  I'm certainly not intending to pick on the people who use Instagram just because they are the sort of people who use Instagram.  However, since almost everyone who uses the service knows of these two tired jokes or should have noticed that the novelty of these two actions has worn off, what I don't get is why I still see pictures that fall into one of these two categories on my Facebook feed.  I won't begrudge the urge to use those features on occasion, but I see both with regularity.

I used to think the same thing in the late 90s and early 2000s when someone put too many actions in their PowerPoint presentations or used Comic Sans anywhere.  It screamed, "Guess who just started using MS Office for the first time."  Only this feels like people aren't distinguishing that the features and behaviors have the most value when they are used as infrequent novelties rather than the normal way of doing things.

As an example, taking a picture of your meal makes a lot of sense when your meal is novel.  As "novel" implies, this is truly rare.  Are you eating the face part of the food?  Snap a picture and post it, because I don't see that every day!  Is there a finger floating in your soup?  Post that picture so that I can say I saw it before the lawsuit happened!  Has this happened ten times, and you've posted pictures of the last nine?  In this case it's not novel any more.  Did you make a salad for yourself without anything particularly special in it and want to post a picture to brag about your salad-making skills or the fact that you're eating healthy?  Honestly, it isn't a deep secret that most people simply don't care. It just comes across as a cry for help.