INSTAGRAM VS REALITY — “INSTASAD”
We tweet. We snap. We instagram. We share our lives — everywhere and with everyone. If I want to, I can have an insight into Kim Kardashian’s Clothing room, into Ashton Cutcher’s Sunday Morning rountine or just into the more or less normal life of someone I casually know.
I personally, don’t tweet and I rarely use Instagram to show something personally. But if I post a picture, I make sure it looks good — perfect even.
Yeah, as if I would have my super healthy acai bowl every morning after a long run at the river. And no, my selfies are no “snapshots”, they are added with filters (at least 2) and lightened in a very flattering way. So no, what you see on my instagram profile is not me - not at all. How would an Instagram-profile of a celebrity or famous blogger, that has even a social media assistent and tonns of makeup-artists and designers, show a real insight of one’s life? It simply does not! In the past few years there was all of a sudden a new way of being famous. Youtube-Stars, giving Make-Up tips, or simply Instagram-Stars that post nice pictures, took over the internet and made a lot of money and fame with it. No wonder, people started to compare themselves to them (I do so, too). And it makes me feel bad everytime Iook at a picture of them. So one day, I asked myself, why I voluntarily do this to myself and I just started to unfollow all celebrities or just other profiles that would make me feel this way.
Paulina Pinsky, a Media Blogger, wrote an article about that very phenomenon, that so many, especially girls, suffer from. She wrote that she realizes that following these VIPs made her feel bad about herself. About her body and her “boring” life.
We need to realize that Instagram does not show the lives of other people, but the image other people want to create of their life. Yes these people do also have bad skin sometimes, and no they do not look like this when they #justwokeup. On Facebook you tend to be friends with people you at least know a bit or have talked to sometime. On Instagram, however, you can just “follow” a total stranger. This is the beauty and the danger of it at the same time. When I look at an instagram post of a friend on a beautiful beach I may be jealous for a second, but I usually know enough of my friend’s life, to know, that there are not only these flawless days in his or her life, and that he or she struggles like me, too. Looking at a picture like that by a total stranger, however, gives me the impression that their life looks like that every single day. And this is what makes me feel bad about my life in return.
With Instagram becoming bigger and bigger, social scientists concentrated on that very phenomenon I just described. They asked people to record their instagram-habits and how they feel about the pictures they see by strangers compared to the ones of their friends. The results once again show, that we should stop to a) compare us to others and b) pretend that our lives are flawless.
