How much thought and effort do you invest in making sure you look good, popular and happy on Facebook or Instagram?
How real are you on social media?
In “Essena O’Neill, Instagram Star, Recaptions Her Life,” Jonah Bromwich writes:
With over 800,000 followers, Essena O’Neill is an Instagram star. But Ms. O’Neill, a 19-year-old Australian, recently surprised her fans by abruptly speaking out against social media.
Changing her Instagram name to “Social Media Is Not Real Life,” Ms. O’Neill has denounced the artificiality of social media, recaptioning many of her old pictures on the site to reveal the painstaking work that went into creating what seemed to be spontaneous moments. It was akin to Beyoncé admitting that she did not, in fact, wake up like this.
In one of the pictures, showing Ms. O’Neill in a bikini, the caption has been rewritten to explain that the photo was taken and retaken over a hundred times. In a smiling selfie, the new caption ends with a disclaimer all in uppercase: “There is nothing real about this.”
Ms. O’Neill later removed her Instagram and YouTube accounts from the Internet entirely.
Her awakening to the posturing she says is inherent to social media was accompanied on her page by images and drawings that promote a philosophy opposed to self-promotion.
She was particularly frank about her attempts to change the way her body looked, describing herself in one old picture as “a 15 year old girl that calorie restricts and excessively exercises.”
The most recently posted image was a resharing of a popular Tumblr meme, a cartoon of a person with a television for a head, its screen reading, “We are a brainwashed generation.”
Students: Read the entire article, then tell us …
— How real are you on social media? Why?
— Do you try to capture the best moments and most flattering images to post on Facebook, Instagram and other social media? Do you keep your most real and personal moments private?
— How real do you think your friends — or the celebrities you follow — are on social media?
— Do Facebook and Instagram ever make you feel bad? Do the popular social networking sites sometimes make you feel as if everyone else is having more fun than you? Or that they are happier or leading better lives?
— Would you want to create a fake Instagram account, or “finstagram,” that presents a truer portrayal of what your life is really like, as this Times article describes?
— Have you ever consciously decided to take a break from social media because you were tired of reading about how great everyone else’s life is — or because you were exhausted from trying to keep up with your own accounts?
— Do you think Ms. O’Neill made the right decision in revealing how contrived her photo shoots were and in canceling her social media accounts? Why?
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