Is Instagram "Fake?"

This week in our book, “Social Media Marketing Workbook” by Jason McDonald, he talks about Instagram. Instagram is my favorite form of social media, so I was excited to know his opinion of it. He used many little phrases to describe the photo-driven platform such as “a party with a purpose” and  “a multi-person scrapbook.” But the phrase he kept revisiting to describe Instagram was “fun, family, photos, and fake.” Fake?
           
I understand why he would label Instagram as fake. He further explains this saying Instagram shows “life as it should be” instead of “life as we know it.” He says Instagram is a place where people embrace the “human desire to show off.” I do understand what he means by this, but I don’t completely agree. I think social media can be misused by individuals who post things to actively try to make people think their life is better than it actually is. They post only the photogenic moments of their life. This isn’t a totally bad thing; I think it is important for businesses to use social media in this way. You don’t necessarily want to see a company you support post about how they’re going downhill. But when I see individuals who post the not so perfect looking moments along with their beautiful selfies, I look up to them as someone who is doing social media right. I don’t think Instagram was a platform designed to just collect a bunch of pristine pictures. I like the idea of a scrapbook, which pieces together both the posed and honest moments. Perhaps it takes more courage to show the candid moments along with your favorite pictures, the emotional moments along with the blissful ones, but I think it shows your true humanity and makes you a real person people want to follow. When it comes to individuals using Instagram, I think it is meant to be a place to share, not show off. If your Instagram is full of all happy, beautiful pictures, and you posted them all with the intention of sharing the happiness and beauty with others, I don’t think that’s narcissistic at all. Why wouldn’t you want to share those moments? I think it is different when people post pictures with the intention of gaining happiness from how many likes and comments it receives.
Instagram and all of social media is tricky! It gives us an outlet where we get to create a profile for ourselves. We can design it in almost any way we want. It is very tempting to think of using it to show off or make it look much more photogenic than our life really is, or to do what you think will make people like you. I think we’ve all been there and fallen into social media temptation once or twice. But when we make the choice to use social media to share what makes us genuinely happy in our lives, it is automatically more beautiful because it is real!


What do you think about the “fakeness” Instagram can tempt you to conform with?   

Comments

  1. UnknownMarch 20, 2018 at 12:58 AM

    Addie,

    I agree that Instagram is meant more as a means of sharing things than showing off. Sure we're all guilty of putting mostly positive things up, but those are the experiences we want to remember and share the most. Showing that you're happy doesn't necessarily mean that you're showing off to people. It could just mean that you want to focus mainly on the positives. In my opinion, that's a great mind set to be in.

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  2. UnknownMay 6, 2018 at 4:14 PM

    I think fake is, honestly, a very good way to describe Instagram, and social media in general. There are lots of aspects about my life that I wouldn't share, so the people following me have no idea about those aspects. Instead, I show them how I want them to see me. It is a "fake" representation of me: only the good, and none of the bad. Our profiles that we spend so much time doctoring and editing are the image of ourselves that we want the world to see.

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