The plague of likes, comments and followers has reached such an epidemic crisis point that Instagram is said to be considering the opportunity to see your algorithm-controlled social feed with that data hidden. But the beast has grown too large to curtail. We now know more, but feel less.

The social media generation get their value and worth from the numbers underneath their posts and pictures, rather than from what’s contained in the filter-filled images. Turning off the ability to have the apparent appreciation for these posts published to all, will only lead to greater feelings of a lack of worth. After all it’s better that we know the tree was seen falling and ignored, than not know if the tree was seen falling at all.

As a society we’re now programmed for a need to know more. Not more relevant information, but instead more irrelevant information. We are inundated with pictures of dinners, holidays and celebrations, without any of it being directly relevant to our lives. We seek this information to validate our own existence. Are others’ lives better or worse than ours? How can we promote our own lives to appear better than what we have already seen from our peers on these sites?

We have people eating out in restaurants with loved ones and families, documenting the occasion for the benefit of those not even there – potentially those who we only really pseudo-know. The whole process of going to dinner is to give an opportunity for a break from the norm; a break from the inundation of technology. But instead of enjoying this break, we seek to continue the technological enslavery and utilise this opportunity which was designed to allow for more face-to-face interaction – away from phones, tablets and television – to further the social media persona that we feel a need to develop.

We have a generation of teenagers who are more interested in engaging in digitalised interaction when out socialising in the real world; oblivious to the message they are sending out to those around them. Rather than devoting their attention and basic manners to those who have chosen to spend time with them, they are far more concerned with messaging those who have chosen to do otherwise. The same teenagers are avoiding interaction with their family elders when in their presence. Their focus and attention is on everything but those who won’t continue to live for as long as them, but they’ll be sure to continue to commemorate them online when they do pass. Funerals and deaths are after all, social media fodder.

The internet has given the world the opportunity to know so much more about the world. But it has also given us the opportunity to know more, but feel less worthy because of this developed knowledge. Instagram’s potential change could be a positive step, but the beast of validation via social media has already far outgrown any cage that it could be placed back into.