Reader’s response – Common contrarian culture: Instagram at Warwick

In a recent opinion piece, a writer for The Boar characterised Warwick’s Instagram meme pages as “odd little Instagram accounts”, driven by “ironic detachment” and a “manufactured culture” of gossip. Since these remarks are, in part, addressed to pages like mine, I wish to respond to some of the principal arguments presented.

Warwick’s digital humour is described as “manufactured”. I grant that, and I don’t see how it could be otherwise. The Leamington Post – Warwick’s analogue of The Onion, and, I must admit, my favourite campus page – operates through exaggeration, narrative invention, and experiential fabrication, and yet its satire feels more revelatory than deceptive. No one mistakes its headlines for sociological data; they tell truths through magnifying distortion. If this is not dismissed as “manufactured culture”, it is unclear why Instagram satire should be.

If one believes that the self is most authentic when unobserved, then it’s rather difficult to condemn anonymity, which ensures that the attention rests on the message rather than the face

The charge of “ironic detachment” is misplaced. People do not consistently share content they are “detached from”. They share what feels congruous to their lived experience in the “unfiltered reality” of Warwick. If the humour lands, as I hope it sometimes does, it is precisely because it is not distant, but close and recognisable.

Anonymity, too, is misread when it is labelled “contrarian” and “insecure”. Anonymity is a tool for impartiality, allowing for freedom of speech. If one believes that the self is most authentic when unobserved, then it’s rather difficult to condemn anonymity, which ensures that the attention rests on the message rather than the face. Since we seem to live in an era more judgemental than ever, anonymity allows humour to act as a pressure valve. Moreover, I am funny in real life as well.

Perhaps the attempt to pathologise the growth of accounts like mine as a result of “insecurity” is an exercise in projection. It certainly reads less like analysis than moral unease dressed as sociology. If the author finds the “morality” of the student body decaying because certain things are submitted to The Warwick Tea, or because students giggle at a Warwick Sigma Society reel, that discomfort tells us more about the observer than about the observed.

So long as vice in Rootes persists, and students continue exercising the right to irreverence, Warwick’s Instagram meme pages will persist

The article concludes by warning us that bringing everything into the comedic domain leaves “nothing sacred”. This is a familiar argument, and a conservative one; it assumes that the sacred must be shielded from laughter. But I would argue the opposite: nothing is more dangerous than a so-called “sacred” phenomenon that cannot be laughed at. If engaging in and laughing at the absurdities of campus life is “social destruction”, then that society was already remarkably fragile. One wonders if the author’s disquiet stems from the near-religious satire surrounding the Koan, fuelled by Warwick Koan, Man IndaKoan, and I Love Koan.

I close with an image that lingers throughout the article: the old man yelling at clouds. Or to be exact, an old soul yelling at jokes. Because who doesn’t like humour? Some writers at The Boar may prefer a sanitised ‘bubble’, but so long as vice in Rootes persists, and students continue exercising the right to irreverence, Warwick’s Instagram meme pages will persist, doing what satire has always done: holding up the mirror.