This whole concept is based on people wanting to give off this perception on social media that their lives are perfect. We only get to see the person that is representing them, but that really isn't them. I think that it is harder to fully know someone because we only see what they want us to see. We all share everything that we are doing all of the time. And it almost seems like an addiction to check all of our social media accounts to see what everyone else is doing all of the time. We are always competing with each other to be the perfect person on social media.
I know far too many people that do the typical "let's randomly laugh to get a seemingly spur of the moment picture that's really cute and shows how you caught me off guard and I was looking fabulous while I was laughing in this amazing setting" photo. I think the idea behind these photos are to seem like the photos were taken without their knowledge to prove that even when they aren't paying attention, they are still perfect. Below is an example from Essena O'Neill's Instagram proving this actually occurs. If you don't know who Essena O'Neill is, she is a 19 year-old girl from Australia that recently went through her Instagram photos changing her captions to explain the effort that went into taking the perfect photo. She had thousands of followers and she thought that she was deceiving them all so she felt compelled to inform them. On her website she makes a post explaining what all she went through when taking photos for her Instagram. She mentions that she would spend days taking the same photo until she looked perfect.
I know how I feel when I see photos like this:
- Why can't I look like that when caught off guard?
- How did someone catch such a great moment on camera?
- Their life looks so glamorous!
- They are naturally good-looking.
I might just be skeptical of these types of photos, but I don't think we can be too careful when deciding to accept these photos as truth.