I Hate Reels
I hate reels. HATE them.
There was a time when opening Instagram held the limitless potential of direct messages from friends, colleagues, and occasionally strangers. On any given day, I might receive a pitch from a magazine, a note from an old friend or some feedback on some post or article that I’d written. Today however, it’s almost entirely reels. Stupid fucking reels, ninety percent of which I don’t even watch.
In an age of terrifying digital efficiency, reels have slowly and seditiously taken the place of good old fashioned dialogue. There was a time when someone might send you an article that they read, along with some note - “Did you see this? I thought it was a good overview of the XYZ issue, but I think she misses the point about Z…” You’d reply and just like that, you’re engaged. You’d reach out to someone because you wanted to start a conversation. Ideas needed to be bandied about, harpooned, dissected and post mortemmed.
Not anymore.
Now it’s a reel. Without any comment, qualification or explanation of why they are sending it to you. Open it up and see for yourself! There’s no, “Immediately thought of you when I saw this. Have you heard of these guys?” Or even, “Dude, you absolutely need to see this.” Nothing. To understand why they sent it to you — and why there’s now an expectation that you’ll stop what you’re doing and devote the next few minutes of your life to this clip, you’ll simply need to stop whatever you’re doing and watch it.
I suspect that in many cases, the reason is that the sender hasn’t even watched the video themselves — they just sort of gleaned the subject matter and fired it off to you and a cadre of others before going back to their scroll patrol. By simply sending it to you, they’ve aligned themselves with all of the ideas therein, thus obviating any meaningful discussion.
I probably get about 30 reels a day sent to me. Of those, I’ll watch maybe two. I’ll ignore the other 28 although, in some cases, I’ll respond with an “LOL” or laughing emoji, which, in my defense, is more feedback than what was provided to me.
Then there are the sketchy pseudo-science ones. The ones oozing with cherry-picked academic banter, purporting to turn some well-established scientific or medical principle on its head. Often, these are ten or twenty minutes long. GTFO. In these cases, not only does the sender fail to share why they thought it was interesting, they remain wholly silent as to why they’re damming up the waters of my day with it. And good god, are you really going to shift your worldview on a five minute reel, recorded by somebody you know nothing about, that you came across while looking at Burning Man reels on TikTok?
That all said, I’m guilty of this practice myself.
Yep. My name is Joe and I’m a hypocrite. I try to restrict my reel-sending to those who send them my way, and most of the time — but not always — I include a line about why I’m sending it to that person. But no getting around it, I’m a proponent of the very practice that I’m excoriating.
I guess my problem isn’t that people send reels, because more often than not, the ones that I do watch tend to be amusing. The issue is that the older I get, the more I find that I crave real dialogue. And as social media grinds inexorably forward, reels have become the lingua franca of the digital horde. To expect a generation weaned on YouTube, memes and TikTok to slow down is to misunderstand my own species.
So yeah, if you have a good reel, send it over. I might even watch it.