How does my online behaviour change as new chapters of my life start?
To answer that, let’s take a look at my Instagram data.
I look at four aspects of online behavior—likes, comments, posts and follows-and how they change as my academic and professional life changes.
Likes
The number of likes follows an interesting pattern. At the end of each episode of life, I seem to like much more posts.
This is especially the case for finishing the bachelors and the masters studies. I attribute this to having been with a big graduating cohort
and everyone uploading their theses, or job announcements, or other big announcements that naturally follow completing an academic degree.
It’s also telling that the increase in likes is not as pronounced at the end of my RA-ship, as it was a much smaller cohort.
Comments
Similarly, it seems I comment on other people’s posts toward the end of each episode of life.
We could also see that the number of unique people on whose posts I comment increases greatly in the first year at uni (2013), first year of the masters (2016), first year of the PhD (2021) and my semester abroad (2023).
Posting content
Instagram “Stories” was added as a feature in August 2016. I resisted the temptation to use Stories for quite a few years, even after it took off amongst folks. Stories was just a fake Snapchat. Oh how times change. In any case, I “imported” some of my stories from Snapchat into a highlight reel on Instagram, so it looks like I had over 50 stories in just a day or two. Otherwise, I have approximately 50 stories per year.
Funny enough, most of these stories are about random beautifully unnecessary statistics like this one!
Followers and following
This doesn’t have as clear trends, but it seems like I do follow new people shortly after starting a new episode of life. This is especially prominent when starting the masters (perhaps, the last bigger cohort I’ve joined since then).
One way of interpreting the difference between number of followers and following is that it’s a measure of… pretentiousness.
This is in the sense that I allow myself to be followed by someone whom I do not care to follow back.
Luckily, it seems that I was least pretentious in high school and right now (unless there’s some purely mechanical reason for these convergings that I’m missing now).
So, I do interact with more people and more often on social media around my entering or leaving a new academic chapter in life. How is anyone any better off for having gotten this piece of information? We’re not. This has been, as always, beautifully unnecessary statistics!
Uploaded 2024–04–19; Last updated 2024–04–19