Instagram's Time Counter & What It Means to be Looked At
A few weeks ago, Instagram tried something new. Above each of my reels—each of my quick little 5-second joke videos—it announced how many total hours had been spent watching the videos. Cumulatively. Across everyone who’d seen the video. And I felt disgusted
When people call me a “content creator,” I don’t take offense. And as a content creator, I want people to see my content. But if my goal is to be seen, why should I find myself grossed out by the knowledge of how many hours were spent seeing it?
It’s barely new information. I already know the view-count. I know how long the reel is. I could multiply those two numbers together, if I were so inspired. It’s really just a reframing, after all.
Besides, this is one of social media’s things. It tells us how often we’ve been looked at. “View count” is the most banal description; it’s an audience member. And it should be satisfying to see a time counter. To know I get more hours than I give.
But for that same reason, it’s depressing—I always get more hours than I give. Time is a zero-sum game. Hours spent watching my Instagram reels are hours spent not doing something else. All of a sudden, with the addition of one small metric, Instagram made me self-conscious about the time I’m taking up.
I worry constantly about not wasting people’s time; it’s called “not being a sociopath.” (If you never worry you’re wasting anyone’s time, you need to go talk to a therapist about it. Because talking to anyone other than a therapist about it is a waste of their time). I’m not on the internet trying to suck anybody in. From time to time, I receive DMs along the lines of “I’ve devoted four hours to trying to figure out whether or not you’re hot,” I feel bad. That wasn’t my intention. It really comes down to whether or not I blow-dried my hair.
When I perform my stand up comedy hour, I can estimate how many human-hours are spent watching my show based on the size of the audience (not to brag, but I was a math major). This isn’t a deterrent; it’s a motivator. It imbues me with a (very minor, I have a lot of fart jokes) sense of responsibility. I don’t want to fuck around on stage. In fact, it makes me angry when I see other stand-ups wasting the audience’s time by doing anything other than telling jokes.
So, then, I ask again: why would it disgust me to know how much time is spent watching my Instagram videos? There should be less pressure online; if people are bored of my video, they can click out of it. Honestly, if you make a video boring enough to get your viewers to sign off, you’ve done them a great service.
Maybe it’s because I feel self-conscious about my content. It may come as a shock to my followers to learn I don’t perfect the content I put online (about one in 12 times, someone tells me the video has no volume). I always thought of Instagram as the place for fast content. If people want perfection, they can watch television shows (Gutfeld!, for instance). And I put my faith in the algorithms to hide bad content. I delete early and often.
However, as I grappled with the discomfort about Instagram’s hour-counter, I began to regret this. I’m not ashamed to take up someone’s time with my stand up hour; it’s an hour to which I’ve given thousands of my own. When I think of my videos, though, with the knowledge that 100 hours were devoted to looking at them—videos in which you can sometimes hear a washing machine behind me—I squirm.
But why, then, why am I posting at all? Posting online is a request to be looked at. A request for attention. A request for time. And yet, when that request was met—when I got to see how many human hours I was gifted in return for my reels—I recoiled.
I know comedy has a purpose; I wouldn’t do it if it didn’t. But in my case, I think of each joke as having a six-second purpose. It’s nice to think about 20,000 people enjoying a quick joke. It’s less nice to think about 100 human hours down the drain.
What would calm my concerns, I think, is the knowledge that time spent on my reels couldn’t be spent on something more productive. That time spent watching my reel is merely in-between passive-thinking entertainment-time. That it couldn’t all be added together into something like a medical degree. And it’s easier to think that when it’s six seconds. Not when it’s 75 hours, which Instagram now feels the need to announce that it is.
There’s no way to know how or why people are seeing your content. These apps feed content algorithmically, passively. It was not chosen. I don’t even know what my own brain is doing when I scroll Instagram, so how can I expect that of my viewers?
It’s one of so many of social media’s contradictions. We’re now more connected than ever, but we’re also lonelier. We have access to more information than ever, but the information only gets harder to verify. And in my case, Instagram gave me more data, but it only made me realize how little data I had. How little I knew about how people were watching my videos.
I make myself feel better by reminding myself that people are on Instagram all day; they’re swiping through so many videos. Who do I think I am? No one even remembers random IG videos. I need to get over myself. The six seconds I took up is nothing. Without me, it would be filled with someone else.
But then I return the same question: why am I posting at all? Am I just a social media addict? Well, okay, yes. But I already knew that.
What does it mean for a video to be watched? It means in the infinitude of the internet, my video occupied someone’s attention for six seconds. It means that everything else on there—everything gory, pornographic, horrible, wonderful, depressing, inspiring, breathtaking, informative, misleading, hilarious—was not on their phone. My video was there instead.
And when I know that happened 30,000 times, I feel satisfied. My six-second video replaced some other six-second video for 30,000 people. I may have made some of those 30,000 people laugh, or at least quietly murmur “that’s clever” to themselves, which is kinda the point of online comedy. I also may have made some of those 30,000 people think, “that’s not funny,” which I know, because I occasionally read comments. And I took nothing in return; just a mere six seconds. It’s much easier to compete against other 6-second content.
But I didn’t take six seconds. I took 50 hours. That’s what Instagram’s newest feature was telling me. And I don’t want to compete against 50 hours. I know there are better ways to spend those hours.
It’s an honor and a privilege to be looked at. Have you ever felt like the person you were talking to was looking over your shoulder for someone cooler? Have you ever had that happen so many times in a row that you wonder if you even exist? If not, have you never, like, been to a party? When you’re talking to someone in real life, you can’t know if you’ve been seen. Social media gives us something tangible. A number. The number of times you’ve been seen.
It’s an honor and a privileged to be looked at, but it should be a right. We shouldn’t need a view count to confirm we’ve been seen. Here’s a horrifying story I read in a horrifying book called Fast Food Nation: the food company Unilever was once under fire for the unhealthiness of their food, so they bought SlimFast. SlimFast doesn’t work; I can confirm, as someone who first started dieting in the 90s. All Unilever did was send their customers back and forth between Unilever products; when their junk food (or, um, explicit junk food, since SlimFast is kinda also junk) made them gain weight, they bought SlimFast, which only worked briefly before it became unsustainable, and they returned to the junk food, again and again, forever. This was Unilever’s plan. Keep them in the family for the whole impossible dieting life cycle. It’s a brilliant strategy, really.
Arguably, social media does the same thing. Another of its many paradoxes: when we’re not seen, when life becomes a metaphorical “looked over at the party,” is it because other people are distracted? And are they distracted because of social media? Social media deprives us of the experience of being seen IRL, but in return, it confirms for us that we’re seen online. With data.
But Instagram’s new time feature showed me there are limits to how much I want to be seen. When I know my reel is seen for 50 hours, I don’t feel viewed—I feel stared at. I feel guilty. I wanted to take responsibility for six seconds, nothing more. But Instagram isn’t lying. It’s telling me what I did.
Instagram discontinued the feature, at least for me. But I can’t unknow what the feature made painfully obvious: my reels are taking up space. And with that knowledge, I resolve to make a change. I’m only going to post reels where you can’t hear the washing machine in the background.
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