Instagram model, Essena O’ Neill, made waves through social media with her confession that most of her Instagram posts have been staged or faked, and do not accurately represent the life she leads. She also said that during many of these seemingly flawless images she had an eating disorder, so it bothered her when girls would comment things such as “goals” or “I wish I had your body” on her posts.
In a blog post she even pleaded, “PLEASE CAN SOMEONE MAKE A SOCIAL SHARING PLATFORM NOT BASED ON VALIDATION IN VIEWS/FOLLOWERS/LIKES BUT SHARED FOR REAL VALUE AND LOVE. THANK YOU. PLEASE HURRY UP.” This revelation led users all over the world to question the authenticity of the posts of the people they follow, and their own posts.
Instagram has arguably become one of the most popular social media platforms, especially among college students. With the ability to share pictures of delicious meals, fun nights out at bars or parties, and throwback Thursdays to warm summer beach days in a matter of seconds, what isn’t to love? It’s convenient, simple, and ultimately satisfying. There’s something so exciting about posting an amazing group photo laughing with friends, or a pretty selfie, and watching the likes climb. Or stalking through your new friend’s Instagram and being able to get a sense of her life through 224 filtered photos.
The problem is, almost every photo we post on Instagram has either been distorted, cropped, filtered, faked, or all the above.
The scariest thing of all is that Instagram gives us the platform to portray our lives in any way we want. We manipulate our photos to show the world what we want them to see, nothing more and nothing less.
If you notice, Instagram pages tend to have happy, thrilling, and upbeat vibes. We often share our best moments. We don’t share the pictures of us crying in our dorm room after failing an exam, or getting into a fight with our friend or parents boyfriend or roomate or whatever. For all you know, the happy group photo someone just posted could be from months ago, while currently they are laying in their bed, too overwhelmed or stressed to move. We only chose to show the good moments, or moments we ultimately want people to believe are good, which is often hard to remember when scrolling through someones page.
As a result, it all becomes so constructed. The Instagram you saw last night of the three beautiful girls, big smiles and Vogue-worthy outfits posing before they go out? Theres a good chance it took them twenty tries to get that picture right or that they fought with their friends over what to post because they thought they looked fat or pale or their smile was weird. There’s a big chance that during their night nothing went right, or that one of them broke up with their boyfriend, or that they never even ended up going out because their ride bailed on them. The possibilities go on and on. Because we see this image, we tend to construct ideas about other people’s lives in our heads, and often imagine their lives as far better than they actually are.
Another real, concering issue comes when we compare our own lives to the lives we see on Instagram. We scroll through and wish that our night was going as good as theirs, and we feel disappointed if we think we aren’t having as much fun as everyone else. Often times we base what we think our college experience should be off the photos we see on social media. We don’t take into consideration that these other people do the same thing we all do: they pick a perfect, probably posed moment, crop, filter, airbrush it and send it out to the world. We don’t take into consideration that their life may be far from the one they have carefully created on social media.
On January 17th, 2014, Penn State freshman Madison Holleran commited suicide by jumping off a parking garage. Some of her friends claimed Madison was depressed because she believed everyone was having a fun and problem free college experience, in part because of the images they shared on social media. She felt her own experience wasn’t living up to what she saw around her, that everyone else was so incredibly happy and she was the only one suffering. The interesting thing is, Madison did the same as everyone else. Anyone who went on her Instagram, would believe she was a beautiful girl and star athlete having the time of her life, when the harsh reality was she was actually suffering immensely and coping with depression, ultimately feeling she had no other way out.
Madison, pictured left
This isn’t to say you can’t post fun pictures with your friends, and instead you should post sad pictures. Instagram should be the happy, fun, easygoing place that it is. But when you scroll through your feed, and see tons of girls dancing at bar nights, or carelessly partying, know that you’re only seeing a sliver of their life, a perfect moment that was carefully crafted and intensely thought through. Know that they too have bad days, insecurities, and most likely, nights where they see your pictures and wish their life was as great and exciting as yours.
You will never have the exact life you portray on Instagram, and neither will anyone else. You are not defined by the number of followers you have, or how many likes you get on a post. Like every social media site, Instagram may even slowly fade away, and a new app will take its place. In the mean time, focus on the authenticity of the life you lead outside your phone, and never forget that an Instagram post doesn’t fully tells the whole truth.