LOS ANGELES: Last month, singer Courtney Love, who is a keen observer of social media trends, posted a cryptic message on Instagram.
“Lots of people don’t understand Gen-Z,” she wrote. “I think they’re funnier than any other generation I’ve ever known.”
Accompanying Love’s Instagram post was a blurry photo of herself and a gallery of unrelated and messy screen-shotted memes filled with nonsensical text overlaid on random photos. Love gave a shout-out to several accounts that ha .
Love was mimicking and complimenting a kind of social media post that is now sweeping through Instagram. Known in internet slang as shitposting, this style of posting involves people — usually young people — publishing low-quality images, videos or comments online. On Instagram, this means barraging people’s feeds with seemingly indiscriminate content, often accompanied by humorous or confessional commentary.
A growing ecosystem of Instagram accounts has embraced this text-heavy posting ..