[quote]By Nikki Roberts
Online Writer
Photo courtesy of Instagram[/quote]

Social media is a tremendous platform capable of great things. It can be a tool utilized for communication, spreading awareness, sharing ideas, stories, or even glimpses of your life. Platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter have only become prominent within the last decade, but their relevance is increasing at near terrifying rates.

The initial attraction of most social networking sites is their communication aspect. Opposed to scheduling a time consuming phone call to check up on a long distance friend, the messaging feature on many sites grants users the ability to send quick, short messages to keep in touch with the important people in their lives. Instead of printing photos and waiting to bring them to the next family gathering, photo sharing platforms allow distant family to keep updated on the exciting moments in your life.

One of these programs created predominantly for displaying photos is Instagram, which launched in 2010 and has since accumulated more than 40 billion images. Along with the invention of Instagram came the development of the “selfie”. According to Merriam-Webster, a selfie is “an image of oneself taken by oneself using a digital camera especially for posting on social networks.” Displaying your favorite physical aspects of yourself to the world and receiving likes and positive comments in return seems like a recipe for an instant confidence boost, but what about when your picture flops?

“Whenever I feel like I put a lot of work into a photo, I believe it deserves a great amount of likes, regardless of how selfish that may sound. When it doesn’t [get a lot of likes], I’m disappointed. I wish I didn’t have this mindset, but getting a good amount of feedback and likes makes me very happy,” junior Decarah Myers said.

A lack of positive feedback is not the only way social networking affects self esteem. Instagram has not only helped boost the popularity of the selfie, but it also aided in spawning something else, the monster of internet fame. An internet famous person is someone who achieves popularity by creating and posting humorous videos, comedic posts, or beautiful photos. Referred to as “Insta famous” celebrities, these users accumulate millions of followers, and therefore attract many sponsors. These sponsors are often companies who pay the popular user to post pictures promoting their clothing line, food, or other products and services related to their business. This form of advertisement is effective because it is viewed by millions of followers and is never explicitly expressed that the user is being paid to endorse the product. Many who achieve this so-called internet fame on Instagram are envied for their physical beauty, luxurious possessions, or seemingly lavish lifestyle. Seeing a popular account post a picture of their expensive meal at a new restaurant may encourage you to make a similar choice the next time you eat out, and watching short 15 second makeup tutorials may encourage some to buy the product which the user is subtly endorsing. What regular users don’t always realize is that under the filters and editing, the lives of the Internet famous aren’t all they’re made up to be.

One former Insta famous celebrity who recently came clean about her experience using Instagram’s platform is Essena O’Neill. At the age of 18, O’Neill was able to make upwards of $1500 a post just by marketing beauty products and fashionable clothes to more than 612,000 followers. In a sudden attempt to reveal the truth behind her fame, O’Neill dramatically deleted over 2,000 posts and retitled the remaining pictures to reveal exactly how Instagram stole her life as a normal teenager. According to teenvogue.com, O’Neill described her account as one of “contrived perfection made to get attention”. The lengths she went to in order to obtain this idea of perfection included skipping meals to fit into glamorous clothes, spending days on end doing photoshoots opposed to normal high school aged activities, and obsessively refreshing her feed and reading comments on her posts. On one particular image of O’Neill pictured in a formal gown for a school dance, the caption has been changed to read “NOT REAL LIFE- I didn’t pay for the dress, took countless photos trying to look hot for Instagram, the formal made me feel incredibly alone.” Has social media really pushed young people this far to obtain unrealistic standards? The increasing importance of media on people, such as O’Neill, can be contributed to its growing accessibility.

When MySpace launched in 2003, the site was only accessible by sitting down in front of a home computer. The same rule held true when Facebook was opened to the general public in 2006. Now in 2015, far more people access the Internet using the apps on their phones than they do on a desktop or laptop computer. This means that every post, picture, comment, retweet, and like is carried around right in their back pockets. It is with such an ease of access that social media has gained the power to slowly ooze its way into day-to-day life and distort users’ perception of self image. The correlation between the growing accessibility of social media and its influence on its users makes it clear: it’s time to ditch the obsession with followers and favorites and live in a #nofilter reality.

Social media is created for the purpose of sharing your special photos. There’s nothing wrong with posting a quick snapshot here and there. In fact, it’s ideal in creating a record of the important moments in life.  However, when excessively retaking photos just to have a picture to post each day becomes overwhelming, you’re living too much behind the screen and front-facing camera. Quitting this habit doesn’t mean completely restricting yourself from the world of favs, retweets, and likes, just don’t let social media consume you. Quit waiting for the likes to roll in and instead concentrate on taking photos which capture the memories that will always remain valuable to you.