Are you letting Instagram blur your lines of reality?

Posted on by caitlinmoulds

With 400 million monthly users worldwide, Instagram is the 2nd most used social networking platform around.

It’s horrendously addictive, hideously time consuming and often can be incredibly depressing.

If you aren’t familiar with the platform(I’m sure you are) , Instagram is a photo sharing app. That’s literally it. You share your own photos and comment and like other peoples photos.

When you  put it like that it’s bizarre as to how it’s so popular, because you can pretty much do that on every other social media site… but we’ll ignore that and move on.

You’ve probably heard quite a lot how Instagram is ruining young girls self esteem, and from personal experience, I would completely agree with that statement. Instagram’s explore feed works in a way where if you view a certain type of photo, you begin to see more and more similar photos. So lets say you click on a picture of a fitness guru, or a tanned skinny model lying on a exotic beach, similar photos will start to frequently appear.

Honestly who looks nice after being in the sea? I certainly do not

Until your entire explore page is full of really fit people that make you feel particularly inadequate.

Not great. However this isn’t about that.

There’s another way to look at Instagram: the way in which we are using it to boost our self esteem and egos’.

We post photo after photo of ourselves, where we’ve been and who we’re with. We carefully choose the right angles, pick the right filters, and upload with an ironic comment or emoji to make ourselves seem relevant and cool.

We crave likes, and with that we crave approval.

I know that may sound dramatic, but when you upload a photo and it does pretty well in terms of likes, you’re lying if you aren’t slightly buzzing.  However should we really be relying on social media to feel better about ourselves?

Esenna O’Neil was an Instagram Model, who took to the web to tell everyone that she was quitting, she had had enough of the constant need to be looking amazing online.

It’s a very long video, but its a very interesting watch.

But out of all of it, one comment she made struck clear:

“Social Media is not real life”

And it isn’t, is it?

Why are we now growing up in a generation where by we allow people we don’t even care about, clicking on a little heart button underneath our picture , to define our self worth?

It’s madness. If someone I didn’t know came up and told me they liked how I looked in real life, i’d be a little bit confused, flattered yes, but indeed confused. That just doesn’t happen, and if it does, a lot of the times you’d find it slightly weird.

But would it upset you if your friends didn’t tell you that you looked great, every time they saw you? Nope, you probably wouldn’t even notice.

So why do we expect our friends and others to constantly be ‘liking’ us online. Why does it matter so much if they do or don’t?

Surely that’s just not natural to be gaining compliments from any activity we ever do.

If you liked the photo enough to upload it, and it made you feel good, then yes, you go and you upload that! But the problem starts when you’re sharing a photo in the aim to gain positive reactions to feel better about yourself. You shouldn’t need to do that.

Just think, back in the day when your Grandparents were chirpsing, they didn’t even have places like Instagram to get likes off each other. And look at them now. I’m pretty sure my grandparents have the highest levels of self-esteem of anyone I’ve ever met, and they gained that just through themselves.

We shouldn’t have to be complimented and ‘liked’ with everything that we do, but social media is making it feel as if we should. Instead we should be teaching each other how to gain self esteem through ourselves, and not put so much pressure on ourselves to be gaining ‘likes’.

WHO CARES IF BECKY, 17 FROM LANCASTER LIKED YOUR PHOTO, YOU LIKED THE PICTURE ENOUGH TO UPLOAD IT, YAY FOR YOU.

I’m not saying don’t post on Instagram, God forbid that. Taking photos is great, and Instagram have some fab filters, and it is SO good for sharing snapshots of your day (Obviously at appropriate moments, as said in my other post). All I’m saying is try and gain self-esteem through other forms of life. Instagram ISN’T real life, and the sooner the world comes to realise it, the happier a lot of us will be.

 

99 thoughts on “Are you letting Instagram blur your lines of reality?”

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