Bryony Gordon

GIVEN that he is almost single-handedly responsible for the selfie-obsessed culture in which we currently live, Kevin Systrom is remarkably… well, unflash. The 32-year-old, who created photo-sharing app Instagram and is worth an estimated $1-billion (R13.87-billion), wears jeans and a shirt under a V-neck jumper.

He is neatly turned out, polite, a little dorkylooking, even. If I passed him on the street, I would probably assume he worked in a branch of Gap – but then, such is the Silicon Valley look.

We meet at the London offices of Facebook, the social media behemoth with which Systrom did a billion-dollar deal four years ago. I am escorted up from reception by a burly man with a walkietalkie; there is a palpable sense that someone exceptionally important is in the building.

Systrom started Instagram in 2010, when people still occasionally looked up from their phones to talk to other human beings; with its array of stylised filters that made even bad pictures look as if they had been taken by Mario Testino, the app soon changed that.

Before long, people were sucking in cheekbones and waving their phones on sticks in the air to get the perfect self-portrait. They weren’t drinking coffee – they were photographing it.

You could track the time around the world from people’s images of sunrises and sunsets. #Captions came to be written entirely in #hashtags.

Today, Instagram has more than 500-million users; about 95-million photos and videos are uploaded each day, generating at least four billion “likes”.

It is used by celebrities, politicians and even the Pope – though he has yet to post a selfie. In the summer, Forbes described the company as “the grand slam that’s driving Facebook’s future”.

But Instagram has also become a byword for 21st-century narcissism. Social commentators blame it for a rise in anxiety and depression among young people; last week a study by Edinburgh University’s Moray House School of Education found that social media were creating a “hypercritical” environment for school pupils who were living under the same level of scrutiny as celebrities.

“Instacurity”, whereby people crave the sleekly edited life of Instagram celebrities and the endless likes they ensnare, has become a thing.

This is not news to Systrom, the son of a marketing executive and a company vice-president from Massachusetts. He is ever conscious of the responsibility