Looking back on my final weeks in a rather blighted Blighty from a city which has now started deploying rapid-testing “Cluster-Buster” buses, I realise there were a couple of remarks that friends and family often made as they bade me Auf Wiedersehen. There were heartfelt concerns about whether I would cope with the Viennese linguistic differences (spoiler: it’s absolutely fine), and constant warnings from my mother to not skimp on my food and to eat well, Anak. There was however one recurring comment that really did irk me, and it normally went along the lines of “I look forward to following your adventures of Instagram”, or “It will be easy to keep in touch; we’ve done it remotely all through lockdown”. While you may be hoping for some savvy student recipes from your resident half-Filipino, I’m afraid the following few paragraphs are perhaps a little less of a crowd-pleaser than Chicken Adobo, and will explain how we’ve got something not so delicious stuck down the wrong throat - or rather got the wrong end of the stick, as the English idiom goes.
A few summers ago I regularly started documenting little things that would happen to me on my Instagram story, sharing with my eclectic mix of followers the wild adventures I was having as a volunteer in the Cathedral in Nice, which admittedly were a lot more exciting than I think any of us had expected from a month spent in a baroque Church. It was a quick and easy way to remember the bizarre and unusual incidents that happened to me each day, as well as a lasting memento of all the wonderful flavours of ice-cream I sampled that summer. I still stand by that statement, but a few years down the line and two weeks into my year abroad, I’d like to argue that what once started out as “social” media has turned “anti-social”. Seeing that a handful of your friends have reacted with heart-eyed emojis to an aesthetic ecclesiastical photo is not social; it’s superficial. Constant updates of the mundanities of Cambridge life are amusing, but somehow gnaw at you from the inside and slowly create a FOMO-shaped hole. Looking at photos from other Year-Abroad students is enjoyable at times, and I know I’m hardly one to talk, but I’ve also felt that it makes you hyper-aware of the differences between your experiences. When people feel like and even say they know what you’ve been up to, or even worse, know how you’ve been feeling, just based off your curated feed, I think that’s when we know we have a problem.
Sharing stories is deeply human, it’s visceral and it’s raw. Holy Scriptures are filled with stories, story-telling links generations and cultures; it binds societies together. Connecting with others and finding those who understand you is an equally human instinct, yet the way that my generation now uses Instagram and Facebook very rarely fulfils either of these needs. My Facebook feed is overflowing with inane memes, niche articles and adverts for catholicmatch.com carefully compiled by what I would indeed call a ‘mutant algorithm’. Many of my friends genuinely seemed to stop posting regular Instagram content back in 2016 and only every now and then will a sweet photo of a pony or a goofy Highland Cow grace my feed. Some of my closest friends don’t have any social media accounts at all and are far from the Cavemen they’re often made out to be, but instead are living out authentic friendships. It may be the case that I’ve just hung out a lot lately with friends working on a time-management start-up, but social media does indeed distort and suck away our time – I can’t tell you how often I’ve pulled out my phone to check the time and ended up down an etymological wormhole (did you know the Austrian word for pancake, Palatschinken, comes from the Latin Placenta?!). My screen time is far too high for me to publicly announce but in the past two weeks it’s certainly reached a point where I’ve realised the extent to which we’re manipulatively being pulled away from the tasks and people around us who deserve our attention most.
I now realise this ending might be rather anti-climactic for some, or perhaps a relief for others, but I’ve decided I'm not going to be vanishing completely from the internet sphere. Instead I’ll be saving the photos for later and choosing to look out of the window of Tram 41 instead of into the virtual window into your lives. In the meantime I’d like to hope that this blog is a small contribution to counter-act the vacuous nature of Instagram, and will provide a year-abroad update which is both worth your time and which includes the adventures and the mishaps, the successes and the failures, the courgettes and the pumpkins.
A couple of snaps from recent wanderings:
Pötzleinsdorfer Schlosspark - I rode the tram to the end of the line to explore the local park, which turned out to be quite the hill...
I soon realised that Google Maps isn't so good at showing you vertiginous inclines, but at least the view was worth it.
Hundertwasser Haus - this has been my laptop screensaver for many years, so it was a little surreal to see Windows in person (!)
Marillenpalatschinken on the left; a delicious warm pancake filled with apricot jam - a classic Austrian dessert.