The term Instagrammatology points to a familiar pattern of converting surplus value (generally aesthetic and leisure values) as the mainstay of everyday lives. It refers to the accumulation of idioms stemming from digital platforms that convert attention into value, simplify complex social relations into feedable bites, seem to metamorphose identity as easily constructible and digestible, and extract surplus from voluntary activity under the guise of convenience and connection. When this logic migrates into the private, market-driven university it remakes the academy’s social fabric. Faculty become both suppliers and consumers of platformed content; the university becomes a closed attention economy that rewards performative visibility while hollowing out the substantive labor of thinking, teaching, and collegial care. The result is a university that looks like a social network, feels like a workplace, and expects the addictive engagement of its community as a form of unpaid rent.
At its core the phenomenon is not merely technological but principally organizational. Universities reconfigure faculty time and identity so that scholarly capital is monetized through content production. Talks are recorded, clipped, packaged, customized, and redistributed through institutional feeds. A lecture tends to become a content asset, in a scheme where a faculty member’s reputation is governed through an algorithmic signal. The management, or the deep-state of the university system, celebrates “engagement” metrics—views, shares, comments, buzz, retention, and the like—while these same metrics are folded into performance reviews, marketing collateral, and donor pitches. The faculty who once produced knowledge for a public or disciplinary audience now spend hours curating colleagues’ talks, repackaging them, writing social copies, and maneuvering responses. That labor is framed as professional development, collegiality, institution-building, or brand-building, but it is extraction in a new idiom, that is the extraction of attention.
Two features make this particularly corrosive. First, the institution’s internal platform collapses boundaries between work and leisure. Where once faculty set office hours and departmental seminars, now an always-on internal feed invites constant consumption. Invitations to “watch and comment” arrive on evenings and weekends; missing the feed risks being read as disengaged. Second, the performative incentives skew scholarly practice toward what is “shareable.” Nuance yields to soundbite; long-term research programs are rebranded as episodic content calendars. The logic privileges charisma, speed, and affect over the slow, often solitary work that produces reliable knowledge. Junior scholars learn quickly that visibility, not rigor, is the currency for promotion in environments where institutional reach matters as much as peer-reviewed merit.
This configuration borrows directly from platform capitalism. Facebook and Instagram monetized attention by making social interaction itself a product; the neoliberal university copies the mechanics while substituting academic capital for social capital. The platform wants content supplied cheaply—by the very people whose expertise is its raison d’être—and it wants those people to consume their own product, amplifying it for free. Faculty become micro-influencers of their own employers. They curate, react, and amplify, producing network value the university claims as institutional success. Meanwhile the platform’s design nudges behavior toward repetitive, short-form consumption, highlight reels of talks, “top moments” compilations, and metrics dashboards. These features encourage an addictive loop—check the feed, respond, receive affirmation, repeat—mapped directly onto academic calendars.
The human costs are tangible. Time is diverted from research, sustained mentorship, and careful teaching preparation. Intellectual risk is discouraged because risky, speculative thinking does not produce immediate engagement. Collegiality is reframed as content creation, in that praising a colleague publicly becomes a metric-boosting act, not always a sincere appraisal. Power asymmetries are amplified, in the process. Administrators and star faculty dominate feeds, while early-career scholars must perform visibility to be legible. Emotional labor intensifies—curating conversations, moderating comments, and producing empathetic social media copy all become invisible expectations. And there is a reputational cost! Scholarship begins to resemble marketing, and the line between advertisement and argument blurs.
Students are also enrolled in the loop. The platform’s visibility creates a pedagogy of display, in that students learn that intellectual life is a stream of consumable moments. Curiosity is gamified into participation points and likes; deep engagement is flattened. In what may be worse, the academia cultivates dependency in a crafty manner. That is, if professional development, networking, and even assessments are mediated by the institutional feed, then the platform becomes indispensable to academic life. That dependence is profitable for private institutions because it creates stickiness—students and faculty who cannot imagine the university without the platform are less likely to defect, and their continuous engagement inflates the institution’s perceived value to funders.
Resistance is possible, but it requires collective strategy. First, governance must reassert boundaries and platforms should be opt-in for scholarly dissemination and never mandatory for evaluation. Metrics used for promotion must privilege peer-reviewed outputs and substantive mentorship over platform engagement. Second, alternative models of knowledge sharing should be supported—open-access repositories, peer-seminars with limited dissemination, and protected “slow scholarship” time that is shielded from content demands. Third, transparency about who benefits economically from the platform must be mandatory; if vendors or institutional marketing teams profit from faculty labor, that relationship should be negotiated openly with fair compensation.
If reclaiming the academy is to be a distant goal, the meaning of that journey would have to comprise nodes that rename certain habits as exploitation, even uninformed consensual exploitation, rather than collegial duty. Saying “no” to performative visibility is not merely selfish; it is a defense of intellectual labor and autonomy. Faculty must revalue the slow, private, and often invisible work that makes public scholarship possible. Only by refusing the Instagrammatized academia’s feed’s coercive rhythms can the university resist becoming a privatized attention machine.
The Instagrammatized university is deeply alluring because it promises connection, efficiency, and brand reach. However, it is perilous because it exchanges the academy’s deep goods—time, critical attention, and institutional trust—for ephemeral signals. Recognizing that exchange is the first step in reclaiming the university as a space for unhurried thought rather than constant performance.
Photograph Courtesy: Dmitriy, Pixabay.
Arup K. Chatterjee 