I'm not one to really give much thought or weight to my own grandiose thoughts. I mean really, who cares?
Seems to me though that there is an overwhelming tsunami of images out there, and wading through all the terrible stuff makes it hard to find people whose photography you actually admire and want to look at.
Has Instagram helped or hurt the photographic process? Some days I really don't know. Some days I feel like it is the biggest waste of time on the planet, just a firehose of crap - snapshots with fancy-pants toning. Sometimes you look at a photographer's feed and you learn nothing from them except they are good at Photoshop or Lightroom. Their photos have no voice. They are Mute Photos. Some days I feel like I feed The Beast my less-than-great meat and it ravenously applauds, yet I know that meat was tainted. And I can serve up something lovingly prepared to have it sniffed and ignored like some precious house cat would.
The trick is to not care.