By Rhian Kille, Associate Opinion Editor
Instagram is at risk of making images impotent. In the image of a body we no longer see one – it is simply an empty representation, a signifier, a gesture in the direction of a person. A forum for connection has long since become a stage for performance. Hours spent doomscrolling on social media is disembodying us, fogging our brains and numbing our reactions. Every day we subject our bodies and minds to this ritual of detachment. Over time this rewires us as voyeurs who only take breaks from watching to keep up our own performances on social media. Our stillness is breeding an emptiness that threatens to take hold more permanently; we are using our digital tools to prepare ourselves for taxidermy.
The social media space has become our main exposure to each other’s lives, a way of checking if we’re wearing the “right” clothes, feeling the “right” things, having the “right” reactions. It provides a platform for us to watch and replicate one another. It is a stage for us to perform ourselves to an ever-present audience as well as a vantage point from which we can watch each other do the same. It is another tool to allow us to influence how other people see us, but also how we see ourselves. Every hour we spend on our phone reinforces these habits, we watch and perform, watch and perform. But what happens when we are confronted with bodies that depart from this norm?
Many of us treat our bodies as a means to an image, dedicating endless amounts of time and energy to extreme exercising, dieting and staying up to date on trends with disastrous effects on our health and self-esteem. We have allowed our bodies to have become lame objects of utility and conformity, so is it any wonder that we are failing to respond to images of Palestinian bodies? Footage and photographs of the genocide taking place in the Gaza strip are not signifiers, they aren’t empty representations or performances. In July 2025, media regulator Ofcom surveyed young people, and found that 75% of 16-24 year olds use social media for news coverage, even for serious subjects like the Israel-Palestine conflict. Our feeds are interspersed with images of a people being systematically wiped out. Pleas for humanitarian aid, donation, and attention sit uncomfortably alongside micro trends, celebrity news and photo dumps from people you haven’t spoken to in years. In the West we continue to watch, desensitised and dissociated.
Xuanlin Tham’s book Revolutionary Desires: The Political Power of the Sex Scene (404 Ink, 2025) discusses patterns in contemporary representations of the body in film and in contemporary culture as a whole, including social media platforms. Tham argues that our ability to numbly scroll past Palestine’s suffering unaffected demonstrates a stretching ‘distance between our bodies and the bodies of others’ (Tham, p. 8). She contests ‘the violence of deciding that some bodies do not matter’ and the unspoken consensus that ‘our own bodies must remain unmoved and acquiescent’ (Tham, p.8). This violence is facilitated by how social media has changed our relationship with ourselves and our image. Platforms like Instagram and TikTok have become a cesspit of personal and political images of bodies that are unrecognisable to our own.
In 1993, Margaret Atwood wrote about the male gaze in her novel The Robber Bride. In her words: ‘You are your own voyeur.’ The massive infiltration of social media and photography into our lives has only compounded this effect, especially for women and girls. Late capitalism has ‘enlisted [us] into [our] own market segmentation’ (Tham, p. 17). We are experiencing a widespread crisis in self-esteem as people compare their mushy flawed insides to the perfect personal brands of their peers. This is what psychoanalyst Erich Fromm referred to as ‘the marketing character’ in 1976 – where one “experiences oneself as a commodity or, rather, simultaneously as the seller and the commodity to be sold.” (Tham, p. 16) The primary pleasure Gen Z regularly indulges in is the performance and commercialisation of our identities. Since a young age we have been compiling and condensing ourselves into images, so is it any wonder that we are stuck in a cycle of passively watching others and ourselves?
We are in the habit of harvesting our memories and experiences for another function. The hierarchy between life and image is inverting. Taking pictures can often be what a gathering or activity revolves around – it’s serves as powerful motivation. We live for the affirmation that looking like we’re living our life right gives us. Learning to take a good picture of your “good” body is much easier than learning how to have a “good” life. A good picture has become much more achievable, and desirable. We try not to mind the discrepancy between life and image. The pictures aren’t real representations, until they are.
Our bodies are becoming appliances, display models useless beyond aesthetics. Viewing our bodies and identities as commercial objects, and prioritising how they look over how they feel, damages our relationships with ourselves and with others. In Revolutionary Desires, Tham theorises this perverted relationship with our bodies and ourselves hinders our ability to desire. Desire is what propels us toward a better world that would make more “sense” for everyone. She argues that the key to these ‘revolutionary desires’ lies naturally in our bodies, in our embodiment.
Spending time with our screens is something we do alone, whether we’re doomscrolling or curating a photo dump. These activities are sense-lessly self-indulgent, they are pleasureless and they are separating us. They don’t allow us to “imagine a situation where […] we are the same thing, the same event” (Tham quoting philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, p. 46). Becoming a re-embodied collective is, according to Tham, ‘what powers a movement’ (Tham, p. 46). Gen Z spends up to nine hours a day isolated, desensitised and disembodied. Social media platforms encourage us to fixate on our individuality and conformity simultaneously. We spend hours curating our identities, asking ourselves ‘what kind of person am I? What kind of person do I want people to think I am?’. These questions grow louder and louder in my mind every day, a growing feverish obsession.
My Instagram is inundated with pleas for aid and attention from families in Palestine. People desperate for help and forced to beg an invisible audience to take any action: watch the video three times, like, comment, share, repost. These videos reach us in a hazy din of numbness, and our bodies don’t recognise theirs. In this haze, our reflexes kick in. We are unconsciously training our instincts all the time. We watch and perform what we think we’re supposed to, informed by the examples we set for each other. But, what do we do when no one is watching us? Are we flesh and blood like the people in need, or as empty and static as the photographs we represent ourselves with?
I think we need to ask ourselves if our technology is making us as unfeeling as taxidermy. More of us need to be sitting with the question: What kind of people are we? For ourselves, for each other and for those who need our help we need to seize back our bodies and the potential they hold for change. We have to reject the haze of the voyeur and be mindful of what our habits are doing to us. We have to reset our instincts and attack our apathy, taking intentional action beyond the arena of social media. A movement cannot occur with a group of individuals who value only being perfect and still, separate and seen. The camera cannot continue to eat first because we aren’t the ones it is starving.
Please consider donating to help Palestinians and make sure to follow Royal Holloway’s Friends of Palestine @rhulfriendsofpalestine on Instagram.
Medical Aid for Palestinians:
British Red Cross:
Doctors Without Borders:
Palestinian Children Relief Fund:
Image: Marianna Smiley via Unsplash