Has Instagram become an extension of our Identities?

Let’s set the scene.

You’re at a party (pre-covid).

You meet someone for the first time.

You spend roughly ten minutes talking to them.

Then, later that night…

The first thing you do when you get home is …

Look them up on Instagram…

Nothing necessarily wrong with doing this, honest, subconscious act. But why do you find yourself looking them up on social media?

Instagram has secretly become part of our identity. As I scroll through Instagram, I can’t help but analyse the content and qualities of each post I see. Whether it be friends, strangers or acquaintances. I look at people’s Instagram accounts as if that were part of their identity, an extension to their personality. Because of this, Instagram often ends up being used to help form someone’s identities in one’s mind. You use it to fill in the gaps of their personality that you weren’t able to find out about them through those ten minutes of chatting. You are building an idea of who they are based on a combination of the ten-minute conversation and what you saw on social media.

With Instagram being made up of just photos, it is easy to curate your online identity to make you look or seem any way that you want or to create your ideal self. After spending so much time inside because of the pandemic, with the primary form of communication being social media, I realised how I often put people I come across on Instagram on a pedestal. Living in tiny Malta, everyone knows everyone, so the likely hood is that I will eventually stumble across my peer’s Instagram accounts and start to base their status from their account.

As restrictions have slowly started to ease, it is easy to come across the same people you saw on Instagram, face to face and in person, and immediately say to yourself, “oh they’re cool but they’re not as cool as they perceive themselves to be on Instagram.” Whether you view their Instagram account before or after you meet them, Instagram can still fully affect the way you view and perceive people.

I often find myself looking at my own Instagram feed. Looking at how I too have carefully curated it and how I have been subconsciously picky about what I post online. Perhaps this is so people perceive me in a certain way or maybe because I have subconsciously created a certain standard for my social media posts.

However, we all fall into the social game without even realising it. We all try to create the perfect version of ourselves on Instagram by posting photos that eventually act as an extension of our identity that we can have full control over. Additionally, mobile phones, so often carried near the physical body, can be seen a part of the body and the self, the phone being an extension of our bodies and identities (Chako, M, 2018).

But, the difference between controlling your identity with face to face conversations is somewhat more challenging than controlling your identity on Instagram, where it is a lot easier to fake it. People can experiment with their identities in ways that would be difficult offline, exploring various and prospective elements of themselves in the process.

My identity online is almost as if it were separate from who I am as an actual human being. Can you say the same?

This blog is a project for Study Unit DGA3008, University of Malta