Jacob Mikanowski has, in The Point, an invigorating essay on Instagram, that most civilized of social networks. It begins:

Of all the social networks, it’s the easiest, the simplest, the least full of harm. Let’s put it a different way. Facebook is Sauron. It’s also your mom’s couch, a yoga-center bulletin board, a school bus, a television tuned to every channel. Twitter is Grub Street, a press scrum, the crowd in front of a bar. Reddit is a tin-foil hat and a sewer. Snapchat is hover boards, Rock ’em Sock ’em Robots and Saturday morning cartoons. Instagram is a garden: curated, pruned, clean and pretty. It lets you be creative, but not too creative; communicate, but without saying too much. No embedding, no links—just photos, captions and hashtags. Elegant. Simple. Twenty-three filters. A crisp square around each frame.

Instagram, the charm of which seems fated to eventual extermination by Facebook, its charmless owner, is the only social network, other than, maybe, Tumblr, that Jane Austen might have liked. It is wrapped in unstated but almost ceremonious codes of conduct. It sometimes seems, as Mikanowski points out, like “an index of mores in the age of self-branding and self-surveillance.” And in its fleeting, multitudinous images we see, as in the bowl of a smoothie-making blender, a history of visual art. “Practically every photograph of nature on Instagram,” writes Mikanowski, by way of example, “stems in one way or another from the impact of the Romantic era.”

But if Instagram is inspired by what might be termed an artistic impulse — “that need to make life itself aesthetic, to ask, over and over ‘What will this look like in a square?'” — it also subverts that impulse, drains it of its upsetting, dislocating energies: filters it, frames it, captions it. In the busy world of Facebook, Instagram is the museum.