What does your Instagram “filter” say about you?

We’ve all seen the reductionists posting their technological determinism videos (digitally, ironically) about how technology is changing the social world in a negative way, and how people are no longer unique individuals — I’m here to dismiss that idea, and argue that it’s more so a case of us knowing how to pick the best filters.
The first thing to note in the dismissal of technological determinism is that Instagram and Facebook did not initiate conformity and deindividuation. These are normal aspects of the social world, that demonstrate the way that we can “filter” our identities (as one of my classmates in my #SRDW2017 class described) across different situations — Instagram being one of them. An article by Klein, Russel, and Spears (2007) examined deindividuation and conformity by considering the ways that relations of visibility to an audience can affect public expressions of identity-relevant norms. They also consider how performances of social identity can actually be used in the construction of the identity itself. It’s a bit of a food for thought kind of article, but definitely worth the read.

But bringing it back, some people think that a filtered identity is essentially someone acting outside of their own self-concept — pretending to be someone they are not. However, is important to remember in this case that the online and offline worlds are not binary categories — and neither are our identities. Our identities are fluid and are represented differently across different environmental contexts — but it’s still not one identity intercepting or replacing the other, nor is it a different identity coming out at a different time for each specific environment — it’s about filtering.
Think about the struggles that come with uploading an instaworthy pic — the whole “Valencia or Lux” debacle. Valencia looks great on a pic at the beach, but probably not as good on a pic from a night out right? Either way, no matter the filter, the same person is posting about the same experience in the same photo; the same person has constructed the environment they are representing themselves to be within. The identity behind the post is the same. They have not changed. The ‘other’ side of them has not come out. They are one human, with one fluid identity. And as our teacher Jenna argued in her thesis paper, which she was kind enough to send to me: “when identity is presented as something which consists of multiple identities and overlapping selves, it can invoke essentialist notions of a ‘core self’”.
So, a filtered identity does not always indicate un-trueness or deception (yes, there are people who lie straight up about who they are over social media [can anyone say catfish?] but this post isn’t about them — they get enough attention). A filtered identity is more so a contextually relevant expression of a certain aspect of one’s identity (see Tajfel & Turner, 1979). But we need to remember that this does not mean we have all these different mini identities popping out at the right time — it’s the same identity sparking up in the times and places deemed relevant. If one was to post photos of themselves situated only in beachy environments loaded up with high levels of valencia, even while they’re at work in their office — does that make them a liar? A fake? Someone with some kind of identity disorder? Nope. Just they’re filtering. They’re making place (the online aspect of the social world), “relevant to their [beach loving] identities”.
With all of this in mind, doesn’t the technological determinist argument seem a little lame?
