Since we have discussed the affects of hashtags and the use of outside applications within Instagram, as well as some of the overarching social affects, it is time to think about how else Instagram pressures us.

Do you feel there is a need to have the “perfect Instagram”? On many levels users compete with one another for, at the very least, attention.  Connor Franta quotes in his Guide to the Perfect Instagram, that Instagram allows us to be “faking reality since 2010”. Outside of the photo-editing capabilities of Instagram he uses four different applications for a single photograph.  That makes me question, are we really that motivated by photography, or are we on the pursuit of perfection?  I personally believe the latter.

Clearly an application used to be social is meant to bring people together. That is the intention.  Yet I have a hard time believing that we are successfully executing that concept.  Yet, as we discussed how hashtags and the application “know-how” affect the literacy involved in Instagram, I feel it is fair to say that Instagram can really damage self esteem, as well as an individual’s concept of reality and other’s reality.  For example, in 2016 Teen Vogue discussed how looking at Instagram could make a person’s body image, and subsequently their grades worse.  They even used the example of looking at your friend’s beach pics, not even celebrities.

I think Instagram can divide people based on beauty and aesthetics, even if it is just the clever use of photo editing literacy being practiced.  And overall, the practice of Instagram’s social literacy is affecting the young population the most.

My favorite exerpt from Adriana Mariella discusses the dangers of Instagram, and encapsulates how even though we are “together” we are also fragmenting one another and our realities.

“What might make you green with envy through the lens of X-Pro II might, at best, be mediocre through the lens of real life. When we look at Instagram, we see a life literally cropped and filtered — a perfectly-set dining room table, while there’s a half-renovated living room just beyond the frame.

Instagram is imperatively filled with half-truths and optimizations of life, yet we still use it to gauge our own. For some reason, though, we don’t consider Instagram photos to be as manipulative of reality as the photos in magazines.

This is because despite the editing, they seem more accessible because we know the photographers.”

The full article can be found here.