Are We “Instagram Worthy”?
October 14, 2021
By Lindsay Boudreau
We all have a friend who spends upwards of an hour editing their pictures for social media—especially when it comes time to post on Instagram. Dozens of popular apps are dedicated to the editing process: they filter pictures, blur acne, whiten teeth, adjust lighting, change makeup, add fake hair, and much more. The purpose? All of this is to change one’s image to make them appear ‘better looking’ or ‘more put together’ to their followers (and even strangers if one’s account is public). But posting on Instagram was not always like this.
When Instagram launched in October of 2010, the norm was primarily to post one of two things. The first type of post was a completely random picture with little editing or at most, an Instagram filter. These posts were of someone’s experiences with random landscapes, cute animals, or ‘aesthetic’ looking meals. They were often motivated by our attachments to the image rather than how glamorous the image was. The same goes for the second early type of post—the infamous selfie. In the early 2010s, we would take pictures of ourselves with little attention to the background, lighting, or occasion. Again, the most editing that we would do would be through Instagram itself with their filters, and the selfies were often taken using the app itself, so they were rarely planned beforehand.
Nowadays, a lot of people (we’re almost all guilty of it) obsess over just about every detail of our Instagram posts. How’s the lighting? Is the background cute/trendy? Is my pose awkward? What about my hair and makeup? Is the fit “Instagram-worthy?” Should I use the picture with or without the purse? And then comes all the photo selecting, editing, and brainstorming for our captions. But why do we put ourselves through all of this? The social media community has slowly made Instagram users feel more and more competitive with each other. Perhaps it began subconsciously—people tend to compare themselves to others in general, and social media just accelerates this. The origin aside, most of us put a lot of effort into our social media posts to try to look a certain way to others.
Within the last few years, there have been small movements to “make instagram casual again.” This calls for people to reduce all of the editing that goes on with posting and choose to simply post pictures that make them happy (and pictures of them being happy). The idea is to transform Instagram into being more about authenticity than ‘flexing’ or trying to be perfect. Today, this trend has over 45,000 posts under its hashtag (#MakeInstagramCasualAgain). This seems like it would make the movement pretty popular, but with Instagram having over 1.3 billion users… it’s really just a drop in the bucket. Regardless of if you feel like using the hashtag, it would be beneficial to everyone if we started thinking less about how we look in pictures and more about how we feel about those pictures. Maybe post that picture where you’re smiling with all your friends—even though your hair is in your face. Consider posting the picture you took of the T at sunset that makes you love being in Boston even though it’s a little blurry. In the end, there should be no “Instagram worthy” categorization of our pictures. Try to take a step back from the competition and post things that bring you joy instead.