Sometimes I wonder if I have well & truly lost my mind. Whether I had it together in the first place is debatable, but seriously. Whenever I buy something pretty I have this sick, self-obsessed routine;
I will get home. Put my bags down. Take my shoes off. Pretty normal shit, right? Then, the FIRST thing I do is grab the objects of my misspent money & I traipse around the house trying to find THE perfect place to get THE perfect picture to upload to Instagram. It’s both narcissistic & sad, yet I cannot stop. & this is why Instagram is essentially one of the most fucked up & contrived social media platforms to have ever leached its cancerous roots into my life.
I LOVE Instagram, let’s get this one fact straight before people hound me for my meticulously curated account of preplanned beautiful shit that I oft upload. I LOVE IT. I CHECK IT RELIGIOUSLY. I UPLOAD RELIGIOUSLY. I STALK PEOPLE RELIGIOUSLY. I’m obsessed with it to the point that it’s starting to mould & shape my everyday life in a way that is both laughable & toxic. Facebook, on the other hand, kind of pisses me off. The amount of times I see posts about something like animal abuse & then stew on it for weeks while never actually doing anything tangible about it is ridiculous. Facebook annoys me constantly, even though I for some reason still have it. Mostly to laugh at funny shit & tag my boyfriend in things, I guess. WHY is it, though, that Facebook well & truly has the ability to upset me regularly, & yet all Instagram does it satiate some primal magpie-like desire to see bucket-loads of pretty things? BECAUSE INSTAGRAM ISN’T FUCKING REAL. I’m NOT saying that every person that’s using it is fake (hello, am I not one?! I’m addicted to this shit). But every single upload on Instagram comes from a completely falsified & preordained place, & it’s not an honest representation of either life or who we are as individuals. It’s curated like an art gallery would be, the entire process of uploading an image much more intricate of a thought process than you have probably ever considered.
Let’s take a look at the ‘insta-celebrity’, shall we? The kind that posts their breakfasts to receive upwards of 10,000 likes for a bread board with food on top of it (no boobs in sight & 10,000 likes?! Witchcraft). While you or me would just make our breakfast & fucking eat that shit while wishing we could go back to bed, I imagine the ordeal of being an Instagram celebrity & eating breakfast would be utterly exhausting. While we would just shoot it on our iPhones while sipping coffee, my half-trained & unfinished-photography-degree eye tells me that these people take their pictures on a professional-standard digital SLR camera. Normal people speak? An expensive camera with a big-ass lens. That’s why their toast looks FABULOUS. It was taken on a fabulous camera, & maybe even tweaked on photoshop before being emailed to their mobiles to then be uploaded on Instagram with a pretty filter. & that is the process to getting thousands upon thousands of likes for a food photo. How much more contrived & constructed could anything possibly be?
I’m not here to just rag on other people who can’t defend themselves, I’m going to rag on myself too. My selfie-taking process (just the word selfie has immeasurable amounts of self obsession which I am ashamed of) is lengthy & stupid. First of all, I never take selfies in front of people. Obviously, it’s EMBARRASSING. There is an innate part of me that is at least trying to be normal. If someone were to film me taking selfies & play it back I’m sure it would be the most cringeworthy thing ever. Nearly as cringeworthy as Kim Kardashian’s selfie book. I probably take, on average, 30 selfies in a selfie session. 30. THIRTY. T-H-I-R-T-Y PICTURES OF MY OWN FACE. Then I cull. Double chin in that one? Delete. Eyebrow hair out of place? Gone. Hair looking flatter than my sorry ass after drinking a bottle of wine the night before? Fuck no, delete. So then there’s the candidates. I will look at each (say, three?) ten times each; picking them to within an inch of their lives. Two will get deleted as I looked at them so much they’re now butt ugly. There is a victor, finally. A face I am okay with letting my followers see. Better slap a filter on it so I look better than I actually do in real life. VOILA. AN INSTAGRAM SELFIE POST! I have literally micro-managed this picture to within an inch of its life. It’s not casual. It’s not simple. It’s not even really that honest, I guess.
Before Instagram. Raw image.
After Instagram, including a filter etc.
Such is the premise of instagram. It’s not really an accurate or correct representation of anyone’s lives, including my own. Instagram shows what people deem the “best” parts of their lives: the holidays, the shopping sprees, their dimple free asses after the 100 squats a day challenge & their new, juicy fake boobs which came with a free side of 20,000 new followers. At least on Facebook people sometimes get drunk & write a status about their dodgy baby daddy who hasn’t paid child support since their kid was born. At least that’s real as fuck, however questionable it may be to over share on the internet. You will rarely see that kind of raw honesty on Instagram among the green juices & Wang Rocco bags. I guess that’s why I love it, it’s all amazing shit & none of the bullshit. But it also pains me, because I pride myself on being such an ‘honest’ & ‘real’ person. But anyway, I’m off to make a coffee & construct a beautiful vignette of it for Instagram to hopefully get 100 likes. 100 likes or why bother, right?!
See Squared 