No "comment"? The silence of Maldivians' Instagram "followers"

I was going through the Instagram posts of some of my friends recently and noticed that lately other Instagram users in their network, including their "followers", do not generally "comment" to their posts but only give a "like" and leave it like that without giving any detailed feedback as to why they liked the posts in the first place.

Of course, you can't expect all "followers", especially strangers, to write "comments", but I am talking about family, friends, and colleagues who are supposed to care about you and what you do.

According to scientific and social studies, it is not possible for any person to have meaningful relationships with more than around 150 people. Hence, within this limited number, there must be your close and loved ones who can find time to give you ample feedback rather than clicking on a "like" or an "emoji" and then moving on to the next interesting post.

According to a friend, "people now don't have the time to comment" but that makes me wonder: are people spreading themselves too thin, becoming involved in so many different activities that their time and energy are not used to good effect? When there were no internet and smartphones, we were still able to enjoy giving quality time and attention to our family, friends, and colleagues.

So, what went wrong? Some statistics can shed light on the trend but not point to the exact reasons.

Microsoft found that since the year 2000 (or about when the mobile revolution began) the average attention span of human beings dropped from 12 seconds to 8 seconds. The average attention span of a goldfish is 9 seconds which means that humans are now worse than our aqua friends! 

According to Dr. Gloria Mark, from the University of California, Irvine: “In 2004, we measured the average attention on a screen to be 2½ minutes. Some years later, we found attention spans to be about 75 seconds. Now we find people can only pay attention to one screen for an average of 47 seconds".

And this is not to mention studies which have found that people find it difficult to concentrate on YouTube videos which are more than 3 minutes long, something even the platform's managers have pointed out.

The average web page visit lasts less than a minute and users often leave web pages in just 10 to 20 seconds, according to wyzowl.com. 

"Most people’s attention span has shortened even further. They can only click the 'like' button," a friend opined.

"We are churning out so much of junk out there into internet that nobody has the time to even have a serious look at anything let alone contemplate on it," he said, adding that "commenting takes time to think; thinking is painful."

A friend confirmed this, saying that she is "lazy" and love pressing "like"s and "emoji"s to people's writings and comments because she believes that alone can encourage or make them happy.

If that is so, it is understandable that visitors would mostly click on a "like" on Instagram posts that contain only photographs or videos with only a blurb and not much detailed descriptions.

But in the case of Instagram posts that contain "notes" such as anecdotes, a friend said that, that attracts comments because visitors seem to want to share their thoughts and experiences of the issues such notes evoke in their mind.

And on platforms other than Instagram, a friend said that she ignores pages which do not or rarely have comments because she doesn't feel like being belonging to a community there. To this, another friend expressed his view that people have found a community to belong to in the forums of mainstream media and therefore now, for example, reserve their comments to the "garbage" spewed by the local daily newspaper "Mihaaru".

Taking such factors into account, a friend suggested that I should restructure my blog to include "like" and "emoji" buttons but I am not going to do that. My blog is not for the carefree visitors but rather a platform of communication between me and my close ones who do consider me as a person who matters to them and is ready to set aside some time to get engaged with me in serious or even fun discussions online and offline.

My thinking is that if you have family, friends, and colleagues who truly care about your artistry, they will find the time to give you proper feedback so that you can learn and improve your creativity, skills, and talents. People will do what they deem to be important for them, and if they don't give you time, it means you are not important to them, and even if it hurts emotionally, it's time to simply dump them because they are not worth your time, attention, and energy.

So, is it carelessness or laziness which is creating a distance between you and your close ones when rather it should be more convenient to strengthen relationships in this age of mobile internet? If this distancing between you and your loved ones occur on cyberspace, does it create emotional distance in physical space, too?

Yahoo's Flickr still continues to be used by many although they aimed the platform for professional photographers. The actual photography revolution was brought about by Instagram because it empowered the amateur photographers to the extent that there does not exist now any distinction between them and professional photographers. In other words, everyone is a professional photographer now, thanks to Instagram.

A friend quipped to me that the "commenting culture left after Flickr" - after the era when every Flickr member would make sure to say "nice shot" on the "barrage of sunset silhouettes back then". Progressing to Instagram, are we content that we have already exhausted giving feedback to the posts of those who we "follow"? Is there a more convenient and time saving way to give our feedback for those who need them to grow?