The breakfast photo epitomizes the early era of social media, allowing users to share mundane details of their lives with a vast audience. This practice represented a utopian ideal where anyone could gain attention through the authentic self-representation of everyday life. Currently, social media is dominated by influencers and sensational content, diminishing the presence of casual personal sharing. This shift has led to fewer individuals posting casual updates, creating a nostalgic yearning for the more straightforward, engaging interactions of the past.
The breakfast photo is the ur-text of the narcissistic internet, a bit of content that no one else is necessarily interested in but which the poster feels the need to make public.
Posting a picture of what you ate on a given morning was something we did during the early years of Twitter and Instagram, and at the time it felt novel.
The breakfast photo represented the utopian dream of social media: billions of average people could throw fragments of their lives onto the internet with little mediation.
Lately, though, I've found myself missing the breakfast photo and its equivalents online. There don't seem to be as many people casually sharing random moments from their lives.
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