Ever since social media took over our lives with Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or Snapchat on almost every screen in the world, it has been a way for people to express themselves, and portray themselves as they want to be seen.
A major part of this is the photo taking phenomenon known as selfies – they can be a way to show off, to boost self-esteem, get someone’s attention, or try to impress people. They can just be a habit but a large number of us are sending them every two minutes to our friends on snapchat without any thought at all.
The defining feature of a selfie is that you took it of yourself – you choose how you want to be seen, it doesn’t pretend to be natural – it shows you at your best. They were everyone’s profile pictures, they were posted on Instagram, they were taken with friends to commemorate or show off what you were doing, and yet recently they’re disappearing.
All of a sudden everyone wants the candid photos their friends just happened to take at just the right moment where we look like models off duty. Since that doesn’t happen often to us mere mortals, instead we work for the ‘plandid’. People taking hundreds of photos of each other ‘naturally’ looking down, walking around a beautiful place, or even just opening a door.
Then they are posted on Instagram and used to build up an image of us, showing people how exciting our lives are, how naturally beautiful we look caught completely of guard, how effortlessly cool we really are. Of course, it takes even more effort than the selfie ever did – but with the plandid we try to convince people this is real, that the way we want to be seen is how we actually are.
It’s a trend picked up from celebrities and models on Instagram, showing off the perfect life people aspire to, with their perfect photos of them lounging in inflatable swans or in their bikinis on the beach with flawless hair and makeup. This is what we’ve been trying to recreate on our own Instagrams and Facebooks feeds – we try to show our own lives at their very best.
It’s all about image, literally, this shows appearance of naturalness and not taking ourselves so seriously, compared to the selfie which was often attacked as narcissistic, or fake, however these are often no different. We still want people to think we look amazing, but we want them to think that wasn’t the intention.
Of course it’s not the only reason we take these pictures – they’re memories, a collection of our best moments, but still why should we be ashamed of wanting to show off when we feel good about our appearance? Selfie or Plandid there shouldn’t be any embarrassment when we don’t look perfect all the time or that we look this good because we tried. Posting pictures of ourselves can be a good habit – it makes us more comfortable with being proud of how we look and can be a source of self love, as long as we don’t take it too harshly when we don’t quite look like Kardashians and remember that these pictures are not reality.