Jain enjoys the process. “Now I find myself shooting random moments when I’m doing the most regular things like typing on the laptop,” she says. “I save/bookmark audios on the app to use later when I have a fitting moment to go with it,” she adds. When turned into a reel with a song in the background, even an ordinary day in her life seems rather extraordinary, she says. “I feel like the main character of my movie.”
This is the magic of the digital La La Land. Every social media platform is luring its users into becoming a “content creator” so that people spend more time on the app. In an attention-deficit world of endless scrolling, this has led to the rise of a tech and app ecosystem that makes editing and uploading short videos seem like child’s play. This incentivises amateurs or “non-creators” to post content in a way that makes them feel like a movie star, even if nobody shows up to watch the movie. Jain, for instance, does not post “vlog-style reels” with the intention of becoming a content creator with millions of followers. She does it because “it enhances the sensory experience of my memories and that feels great”. Divija Bhasin, a counselling psychologist from Delhi, says we tend to remember memories with a bias in our minds. “Things that are mundane can be seen as beautiful or sad depending on our current situation.” On reels, however, “the bias comes from the text, the effects and the music,” she says. Bhasin, 26, too, posts content on mental health on her Instagram account @awkwardgoat3 for close to 190,000 followers. She has also noticed a sudden proliferation of vlog-style reels on her timeline. Some feature people leaning on a car window as it rains, paired with a sad song to go. Then there are others where someone is turning around while walking, and a slowmotion effect to the pirouette along with a happy melody completes the package.
VIDEO GAMES
Every TikTok alternative — from Instagram Reels to YouTube Shorts — now equips its user base with tools and templates, features and filters, that uncomplicate the process of making and sharing short videos. YouTube has a Remix tool for users to clip and edit a 5-second-to-1-minute-long audio/visual content from an existing video to create their own Shorts, provided the original creator lets you sample their video.
In early 2022, Instagram launched Supersync, a feature that automatically syncs clips and pictures to the beat of a song for Reels. Shortly after, Garima Bhaskar, a photographer and content creator from Noida, published a tutorial blog on how to use the feature. It gained so much traction that it shows up among the top three results when you look up ‘Supersync + Instagram’ on Google. “Majority of the DMs I get on Instagram are from people asking me how to easily edit a video to the beats of music,” says Bhaskar, who has over 114,000 followers on the app. The feature doesn’t always detect the right beats “but is a good option for newbies”. “All these are attempts to reduce the anxiety around video-editing for regular folk, and make the creation process faster,” says Sanket Shah, CEO of InVideo, a homegrown videoediting app. Roughly 75% of InVideo’s users are “amateurs”, says Shah. “70% of the content uploaded to edit is in a video format and close to 85% of users edit the content down to 1-minute videos,” he adds. The app is active in multiple markets, including the US, UK, Canada and Australia.
International video-editing apps like InShot and VN (VlogNow) have gained prominence in India. VlogNow, with over 100 million installs, counts India among its top three markets, as per Sensor Tower. In June, the site Inshot.com got its highest traffic of 18% from India, as per analytics company Similarweb. InShot, the app, has over 500 million downloads on Android and about 18 million user reviews on Google Play Store. For perspective, Twitter, with over a billion Android installs, has about 21 million user reviews. These numbers indicate people are lapping up all the tech support they can get.
Last year, some of the top-trending, usergenerated augmented reality (AR) filters on Instagram in India — like ‘Enhance’ and ‘All Soften’ — were used in over 150 million reels, as per the data Instagram shared with ET. India is Instagram’s largest market by audience size with a userbase of 229 million, says a Statista report from January. Approximately 65% of Gen Z used a filter or a feature, or an effect, on a video app over the past 12 months, according to a Google/Ipsos Global YouTube Trends Survey from May.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
Vlogging is not a new content format but it seems to have caught the interest of more amateur creators in a post-pandemic world, says Gauri Bansal, a product manager at a consumer tech company. “In the early days of the pandemic, some took to glorifying mundane activities through their content as an escape from the reality of those times. Soon, everyone jumped on this trend to feel a sense of belonging,” she recalls. Multiple social media trends — like captioning videos with ‘POV’ (point of view) and stitching pictures to depict ‘Life as a Wes Anderson film’ — further encourage people to spin movie-like reels from ordinary moments of life.
This is the peak reels era when “people are making vlogs of ordinary moments even if they have a private account,” says Sheetal Nimbalkar, a counselling psychologist from Mumbai. It appeals to our innate desire to be socially rewarded even if it is within our small circle of people, she adds. “Otherwise, there’s little else in an ordinary person’s life, other than their birthday or wedding, that can evoke a similar reaction socially.”
Some believe there is no “access discrimination” on these platforms, unlike in the real world, says Nimbalkar. “In some sessions, clients have told me how happy they felt using the same filter as their favourite celebrity.” It has enabled a few to celebrate themselves. “I think I watch my own (vlog-style) reels more than anyone else’s content,” says Rayyan M (@rayyanmonkey on Instagram), a 32-year-old writer and diversity and inclusion specialist. “In these reels, I look beautiful and feel seen and appreciated, which doesn’t happen in my everyday life. As a trans person, I find this immensely powerful as it allows me to curate a narrative of my own in a cis-gendered, heteronormative, ableist and casteist world.”
Not everyone finds the process democratic or liberating. In Sahil Valmiki’s experience, most lifestyle vlogging trends tend to isolate people from marginalised communities. Take the ‘Can we skip to the good part’ trend where people stacked up clicks and clips of them living it up to an uplifting soundtrack of The Good Part by American indie pop band AJR. “People from marginalised communities barely had anything to contribute to this trend,” says Valmiki, editor of the online publication Dalit Desk.
“People from so-called upper castes use songs with words like ‘Banjara’ in their travel reels, romanticising the nomadic lifestyle, while lifestyle posts from the actual Banjara community (part of Denotified Tribes) on the app barely get any traction,” he adds, “even as their news-related reels often go viral”.
This exposes something primal in our behaviour as social media users, says Bansal: “We are subconsciously propagating that even the ‘mundane’ lifestyle has to have a certain type of aesthetic for it to be worthy of being celebrated.” Bansal also doesn’t like how this phenomenon is making her and many around her “collect information in the hope of creating a vibrant memory of a past moment in the future”. “We have lists carrying songs that can go well with a certain mood to be used for potential reels and stories. We post an old picture with a pre-selected song or caption when we are bored sitting at home. People are using AI to generate captions and reel ideas.”
This templatised depiction of daily life is making people less imaginative while giving them the illusion of being creative, says Anurag Minus Verma, a multimedia artist and podcast host. Not only does it omit the discomfort that goes into doing mundane tasks, but the act of utilising the mundane for content is also chipping away at “our ability to feel the boredom of mundanity”.
It’s as if “we are living in the moment ‘only’ to extract a potential snippet for a reel later,” says Niharika Gotety, 26, a program manager at a content-tech startup. She was in the ICU recently due to a health ailment and she caught herself thinking of a theme for a video she can make on her hospital experience.
On the one hand, Gotety feels it is healthier to romanticise mundane things like brushing your teeth or making your bed, as opposed to the previous social media era where only some people got to flaunt their exciting lives. On the other, she wonders if sometimes she intentionally “creates” some moments only to be able to make a video out of them later.
Given the scale at which people are recording themselves going about their lives, there may soon be many like Gotety who may find it increasingly hard to tell which part of life is real, and which part is (for) reel.
