How Unauthentic of Me

This week's lecture got me thinking about how I present my sense of self on my social media. It has challenged whether my content is authentic or if it is selective. I strive to be genuine and authentic on all social media platforms, but there is pressure to conform in order to please others. 

Instagram as a platform has many affordances but its strict focus on photos and videos makes it much easier to navigate than other platforms like Facebook and Twitter that have threads, written posts, links, shared posts photos and videos. Instagram is a relatively clutter free platform, making it much more appealing to users (Investopia, 2019). It provides users with a clear and simple snapshot of people’s lives, which can be displayed in a way that expresses the users' sense of self. As identifying a sense of self has become a large focus for teenagers and young adults, many migrated from Facebook to Instagram, allowing 64% of Instagram’s 500 million daily users to be aged between 18 and 29 years old (Investopia, 2019). 

Instagram allows us to post snapshots of our lives for people to then engage with through likes, shares and comments. Instagram is a key platform for adolescents as it has become a way that many use to help establish their sense of self. I think people love Instagram as we get to see the most aesthetic and interesting parts of people's lives, allowing us to create false and misleading images of people. This selective culture that has been generated through Instagram has allowed us to develop a third person perspective (Yau and Reich, 2018). A third person perspective means that we value peer approval because we feel that we are being evaluated by our audience (Yau and Reich, 2018). We only post what is considered attractive and interesting content and even get our friends to review our photos before posting in order to seek validation (Yau and Reich, 2018). Our content has become so filtered by our own third person perspective, our friends' opinions and what we think our followers will think that our persona becomes curated and selective. 

The clutter free nature of the platform has created a need to only post attractive content and developed behaviours that are considered to be attention seeking negatively such as “frequently commenting on and liking posts, sharing photos daily” (Yau and Reich, 2018). The affordances that Instagram provides in terms of engagement options, with likes, comments and shares puts pressure on users to only post content that will be well received by the audience. But who is the audience? Based on the settings choice of public or private, the audience can be people you choose or anyone as it is a public profile. The public setting allows for a greater following to be gained but seems to place more pressure to feel validated, and therefore their sense of self becomes selective. This is because in order to meet these internalised standards and expectations that exist within the social media platform, users feel they can only show certain parts of themselves and their lives. Thus producing content that can be perceived as not genuine, instead of being authentic and showing their true sense of self. 

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References 

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My Modern Met. Social Media Influencer Reveals Relatable Truth Behind Flawless Instagram Photos [Internet]. 2019 [cited 26 August 2021]. Available from: https://mymodernmet.com/instagram-vs-reality-rianne-meijer/

Twitter vs. Facebook vs. Instagram: What's the Difference? [Internet]. Investopedia. 2019 [cited 24 August 2021]. Available from: https://www.investopedia.com/articles/markets/100215/twitter-vs-facebook-vs-instagram-who-target-audience.asp

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Yau J, Reich S. “It's Just a Lot of Work”: Adolescents’ Self‐Presentation Norms and Practices on Facebook and Instagram. Journal of Research on Adolescence. 2018, pg: 196-209.

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