Instagram's Proposed Removal of The 'Like' Counter; & Why Are We So Obsessed With Other People's Process?

The High Low

Society & Culture

4.8 • 9.6K Ratings

🗓️ 23 July 2019

⏱️ 63 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ding dong the BoJo's in. Duuuuuude.

This week: curry seagull; the controversial Cats trailer; and why Ireland's 8th amendment might have been repealed - but is far from what has been legally mandated.

And on today’s agenda, we delve into Instagram's proposed removal of the 'like' counter, which is being trialled in countries including Japan and Australia. Will this change social media for the better? Will it eradicate 'comparisonitus', a flimsiness of self constructed on dopamine hits, and the homogeneity of 'basic' culture? And what is the future for influencer culture? Dolly and I discuss, with reference to our own complicity in this personal profit model.

We also tackle our growing obsession with the processes and routines of people we admire. From beauty to work to sleep to exercise, we are obsessed with the schedules of other people. But what does that say about the way we live our lives? Is it an attempt to shrug off our own lives and co-opt what we perceive to be a happier, more optimised one?

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Links

Kate Kellaway interviews Lemn Sissay for The Guardian, 2016 https://bit.ly/2bs5oGL

Frank Sinatra Has Got A Cold, by Gay Talese for Esquire, 1966 https://bit.ly/2uLGEqS

Profile of Zadie Smith in The Telegraph, 2002 https://bit.ly/2JV4ftK

'Police officers demanded to see my books' by Elif Shafak for The Guardian https://bit.ly/2Y63aZ8

Is Instagram's removal of its 'like' counter a turning point in social media? https://bit.ly/2Y220yI

Megan Nolan on her teenage relationships with older men for The New Statesman: https://bit.ly/2McXEhb

Caitlin Moran on not slut-shaming daughters: https://bit.ly/2YnjLrt

Why are we obsessed with other people's daily habits? by Suzannah Showler: https://bit.ly/32OVIkP

Less by Andrew Sean Greer

So Lucky, by Dawn O'Porter, pre-order now

10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World, by Elif Shafak

Have You Heard George's Podcast? By George Mpanga https://apple.co/2PieAST

Zadie Smith interview on the Touré Show https://bit.ly/2M9mDBM

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Highlo, the weekly current affairs and pop culture podcast brought to you by
0:19.4	Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes.
0:22.3	In tragic but somewhat inevitable news, Boris Johnson is officially Prime Minister and
0:28.2	in his acceptance speech he used the word Dood and said it Dood.
0:33.6	I say to all the doctors, Dood, we are going to energise the country.
0:39.9	That's a double whammy of shit there for everyone.
0:43.2	Let's not be too deftous, let's wait and see what happens before we ring the death
0:47.6	mail.
0:48.7	In other breaking news, I read a statistic in the Guardian which I thought was pretty
0:52.4	interesting.
0:53.4	Apparently we have fewer best friends in the UK than in any other country.
0:57.3	2.6 compared to Saudi Arabia's 6.6 but new research from MIT sets is possible to have more
1:03.9	than 5 close friends.
1:05.5	What do you think of that?
1:06.8	I think it's completely dependent on the personality type and what kind of life you have because
1:13.0	I know people who have literally four friends, like a handful of friends and those are the
1:18.7	only people that they see and need and need and they're completely satisfied in content
1:25.0	and then I've got one friend in particular that I'm thinking of every weekend when I ask
1:29.3	what she's doing.
1:30.9	She never presents me with a name I'm familiar with.
1:34.5	She must have 150 close friends and I think she's happy.
1:39.0	I don't think she's escaping anything.
	...

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