Taylor Lorenz and the Recap Industrial Complex

By Chris Revelle | Social Media | January 3, 2024 |

By Chris Revelle | Social Media | January 3, 2024 |

As we approached the end of 2023, you may have noticed end-of-year recaps popping up across the social media feeds. These can range from photo dumps to a video montage of moments, all summarizing the year with carefully curated images. This was once mainly the purview of influencers and content creators like YouTubers or Instagram personalities, but over time this practice has trickled down to the normos.

In some ways, this routine can be innocuous, similar to how my parents send out a card every year with pictures of the family from that year. It can be an update you’re sharing with friends and an act of summary and reflection. It can feel great to relive your favorite moments of the past year. However, as with many things that come from the internet, the now-popular end-of-year recap on social media has a cutting edge as well. Social media for the individual is an act of performance as well as curation: a person is not just consciously choosing the photos that project the image of the person but they’re also engaging in a performance of the reality suggested by those images. Performance is exhausting and taxing, especially in an environment like social media where the connection is constant, and eyes are always on your image and information. Social media isn’t called a panopticon for no reason, after all. So what happens when this performance becomes a chore or an expectation, something you must do to be seen for your year to have mattered or happened? Well, that’s what Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz is here to explore.

In her article, Lorenz explains how the end-of-year recap has created a sense of social pressure and an expectation that the life being presented must be cinematic or else should be unseen. Lorenz shows examples of how this morphed over time from the Instagram Top 9 and Spotify Wrapped into the “recap industrial complex,” where each person’s recap is a salvo in a social media arms race to prove who has the most aspirational-looking life.

For those of you who cannot access the column because you don’t have a WaPo account, Lorenz recorded a snappy little video covering the same topic that you can watch on Instagram:

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A post shared by Taylor Lorenz (@taylorlorenz)