Guest Post: Look at Me! Look at Me!: Instagramming an Altered Version of Ourselves

Guest Post: Look at Me! Look at Me!: Instagramming an Altered Version of Ourselves

By Delicia Ansalem

Image created by freepik

Many young people, myself included, rely on social media quite a lot. As a visual platform, it’s easy to share experiences within seconds, sometimes even over-documenting.

Overall, a person’s profile and highlights can say a lot about them. When you meet someone or want to find out more about someone, we immediately look to find their Instagram page. 

Odonnell (2018) explains that we preserve and present our identities through visually documenting our lives through photography and video — an ongoing process that is readily available at any second of the day in the palm of our hands. 

This maintenance and management of an online presence could be for reasons such as career advancements and potential opportunities to name a few. Instagram is the ‘cool’ new platform for constructing an online presence, yet questions around authenticity do arise. The ideal selves that we create online — are they even authentic?

Let’s explore how Instagram plays a large part in this digital identity that we’ve created for ourselves.

It is essentially a tool for self-promotion, self-expression and social interaction. We present our ideal selves through filtering our content and we maintain social relationships through geotagging and hashtagging, which get conversations flowing.

When we post photos or videos on our story or profile, we often geotag the location and will most likely include hashtags. This opens space for many others on the public platform to find you. Through geo-tagging and hashtagging, it allows for people to take a peek into your lifestyle and the self-branding you build online. This ‘realness’ still conceals imperfections of everyday life. We only post highlights of our lives, not our downfalls. Essentially, we seek the approval of our peers.

The saying goes, “If you didn’t post it, did it really happen?” — which sadly, is quite true. We’ve immersed ourselves in a culture where we conclude that if we don’t post about whatever we did, it never happened. This goes a lot for posts around vacations and niche photo spots around the city, such as Nuit Blanche and the Christmas Market in Toronto.

In a sense, we build our online identity and brand for social validity through the sacrifice of our privacy. We document our lives whenever and wherever and will post without a second thought. 

Looking at documentation, Instagram acts as a visual album that allows users to store their pictures along with captions. In terms of the coolness factor, it comes down to Instagram being a fairly new form of social media which allows for people to self-promote and gain more ‘likes’ and comments.

The constant hunger for popularity is quite common amongst young adults who are still exploring self-identity and will do so through the approval of their peers.  

Lastly, creativity comes in the form of captions and filtering images strategically for a structured ‘aesthetic.’

Instagram has become a popular digital sphere for users to construct their own identities and it will only become larger.

Are we essentially creating a profile of ourselves that is formally and carefully constructed and not in anyway ‘authentic’ to our true selves? Not all of us do, but do we post just to keep up a certain aesthetic and image of ourselves — to be considered “likable”? 

Resources

• Storied Lives on Instagram: Factors Associated With the Need for Personal-Visual Identity | Nicole Hummel O’Donnell

Featured Image Illustration courtesy of Defne Inceoglu

Image in Post: Influence marketing concept with smartphone created by freepik and used under freepik license with colour redesign by author, Delicia Ansalem