With Instagram, it’s the harkening back to the past that interests me, in particular. “Authenticity” is a social construction, as much as race or nationality, and those are slippery around the edges. Because it’s hard to pin down, the decision of what’s “authentic” ends up revealing itself as one of taste or emotion. When we cast a film-grain filter on a picture of us with friends, for example, it can add an extra layer of meaning: The snap becomes more than a digital representation of a moment, but also a comment about the friendship, i.e., that it’s something enduring that can survive decades. It gets a kind of emotional aura.

So I guess I’m looking at those filters as part of an aesthetic—as part of an emotional or taste-related choice to draw on nostalgia. After a decade of Big Things Happening, that nostalgia seems natural. We are acknowledging change and time and damage, and there’s something fascinating about it. It’s not just about the damage, but what *survives* the damage that gives us pause, and ideally, hope.

But I think Instagram may be more a case of digital society straining for authenticity by keying back to things that can be touched or felt. Like it’s not so much about fading in a destructive sense—more about ‘real’ photos being an object of sentimentality. The fading is seen as a style that makes all the ones and zeros feel more real — it’s provenance as something destructive is just a coincidence.

So in that sense, I see retrogressive images (never heard this term before, ha—awesome!) as being more like relatives of the skeuomorphic/pseudo-tactile interfaces Apple’s been bouncing around lately. It’s maybe not so much that we feel uneasy with the present versus the past, but it may be that we are uneasy with things we can touch (and are therefore ‘real’) versus things we cannot.