Last week, I posted my first ever selfie. It hit all the textbook selfie tropes on the head. I was in a hotel bathroom, I was wearing my latest purchase — a limited edition collaboration — and of course it took me numerous attempts to get just right. It received the most traction any of my Instagram posts have received thus far and I have to admit, it did give me a bit of a buzz. So how must it feel to be Instagram famous, racking up thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of likes for each carefully curated shot. What must go into getting your personal brand just right?
Essena O’Neill was one of those. Her Instagram posts were regularly clocking up thousands upon thousands of hearts, appeasing her half a million followers with regular beauty and bikini shots, but this week, the 19-year-old came clean and admitted that her social media fame was suffocating her, as she strived to portray the perfect life, body and image through her online presence. Outing herself as a fraud, a kind of existential crisis for the internet generation, she confessed that her obsession with perfection and constantly comparing herself to her Insta-peers left her lacking that ever-elusive personal happiness. But who’s to blame here? Is Instagram nothing but a vacuous product of superficiality? Or is it just the potential trigger for our loaded gun of insecurities?
Essena joined Instagram at the tender age of 12. That’s younger than I was when I joined MySpace, and despite my own floundering self-confidence I was fortunate enough that the foundation of the network was built on emo culture and horizontal fringes, and not 17-year-olds with plastic surgery. Your pre-adolescence is a precarious time in which you’re desperately trying to establish and understand your relationship to yourself and others, and social interactions are a major conduit in which we do this through. Online however, things can become intensified. We carefully curate what we want to be seen, because each post leaves a digital footprint open to interpretation and scrutiny; our social media accounts are the shop windows of our lives now, what our “personal brands” present to the world. Dove’s Self-Esteem Project calculated that one in four girls have deleted a photo on Instagram if it hasn’t received enough likes, and girls with low body confidence are three times more likely to say that social networks make them feel worse about themselves. What good can this measure of self-reviewing do to us? Social media is increasingly heightening our own perception of ourselves, like a digital extension of our ego.
Essena had almost half a million Instagram followers when she decided to open up about what really went into creating each carefully staged selfie. Re-captioning her images to highlight the damaging reality beneath the glamorous veneer of social media superstardom. In one of many confessional videos she released, Essena revealed that she was, “living in a system based on social approval, social status and social expectations.” But isn’t that just any old high school experience? A usual part of growing up? And also something that the majority of us grow out of and leave behind. Part and parcel of growing up usually at some point involves being at the mercy of your friends, craving their social acceptance. We’ve all bought bad jeans, got a piercing, and changed our hair styles because of peer pressure, that’s a normal part of finding out who you are.
What is not normal is having a life that revolves around fabricated situations which you’ve uploaded online for the approval of hundreds of thousands of strangers. It took O’Neill years of living this life before recognising and rejecting its superficiality. Instagram is two-dimensional in its representation of our lives, but how could it be anything else? If you’re after three-dimensional experiences, go and live your life in our three-dimensional world.
The constant inference that anything tech is the future becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you say it’s the future enough times people start to believe it, and it becomes the future. Lives move online, are lived on online, and the internet ferments and creates and defines the aesthetic of youth culture, and Instagram is it’s playground. You can kick it with the big boys but that’s no guarantee you can cut it in the real world. But whilst, for some, there is something to be said in basking in the fleeting adoration of hundreds of thousands of followers, there are simultaneously those being robbed of confidence and self-worth. Perhaps, like high school, this won’t last forever, but until then we need to keep ourselves – not our social stats – in check.
Credits
Text Maude Churchill