Albums
I’m sure you have different albums created by yourself on your phone. You went on a weekend trip and on your way back you start selecting all the photos you made to put them all together in an album, so it will be easier for you when you want to look for some of them or just go through them to live your memories.
As quoted on this research paper posting these days is a thing everyone does and it’s increasing with the years:
According to a recent national survey in Britain, the rate of posting photos online has increased from 53% in 2011 to 64% in 2013 and looking at photos has become the most frequent online leisure activity, surpassing listening to music. (Dutton et al., 2013)
Now it is trending to make albums on your Instagram accounts. You go on a trip and then you post a recap post tagging your friends or make highlights as if an album it was. I even have a profile called belenaz_holanda where I just post about my life here in the Netherlands, I just accept closer friends there. There are 2 reasons why I do this; the first one is for them to see how I live here because I like them to know how I am and the second one is for me to have a place where I store all my videos and photos in one place. So, in a few years, I will be able to log in to that account and see everything.
Exposing yourself
Some studies affirm that exposing your pictures on social media can lead to others imagining how your personality is. Which cover you use for your videos, or how long have you been a Facebook user can determine your first impression on others. This can be harmful; imagine you meet someone randomly and you give each other Instagram profiles, next day you start looking at his/her socials and he looks like the perfect person for you…then you meet in person and you realize you idealized that person because he/she has a lot of pictures traveling and a lot of his/her dog. But we are not always who we show on social media, those pictures are just what we want others to see. Not all influencers have a happily ever after life. Selena Gomez recently shared on their social media she was struggling with some mental health issues even though if you look ate her Instagram now she seems the happiest person on earth.
Inconveniences
We are not aware of where these pictures are stored. We just post them as if we make an album in real life with printed photos. To have all our memories together in an easy place to find them. But these pictures go to the Internet, and they stay there forever, in this case in the Instagram database. So, if something happens these private photos could go viral because you agreed with their policy of letting them possess it. Even if we create an account and we want it to be deleted in 10 years we might not remember the password, so this will be a future problem.
Companies can look at your social media to decide if they hire you or if they don’t. According to this web page, they normally check LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok and WhatsApp. Twitter is one of the most difficult one as normally people talk about their own opinions, or don’t even talk, they just like other’s posts which can tell companies a lot from you.
So be careful with what you post, do everything you feel like at every moment, but always know the possible future consequences.
Sources I checked to inform myself:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0747563214002696
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/642611.642682
https://www.businessnewsdaily.com/2377-social-media-hiring.html
The thing you wrote about meeting someone in person after having met them online was a real life experience to me a few years ago, and it is so true! I was so afraid my offline personality would be so different to them than my online personality, while my online personality must be based on my offline personality, since I am the person behind the profile, right? I still find it hard to answer te question where the line between your online being and your offline being must be – I mean: there is a difference, I think, but it is such a grey zone. It would be interesting if there would be research on what are the most common differences between offline humans and online humans (if that is the correct way to put it) and why and how the people behind these profiles create these differences, I think.
I can admit that I liked using social media especially for how it allows me to have more control over how I present myself. In times where I felt I was misunderstood by my peers, social media was a way for me to reestablish how I myself view myself, and therefore hope to influence others’ perspectives on me. This process eventually proved to be helpful in finding out for myself not just what kind of person I wanted to portray, but made me realise what kind of person I wanted to be.
Yes, social media really is just a facade, but it is also able to reveal people’s aspirations and insecurities, as a lot of people’s behaviour on social media stem from wanting to attain and reflect certain ideals. Making it very difficult to navigate social media if you are in search of reality. When I reflect on my instagram, I reflect upon the cognitive dissonance arising from wanting to stay true to myself, yet also knowing that my digital presence is certainly not purely representative of myself as how I am in real life as I have the ability to pick and choose what people see. The question is: Even when all in good intent of being as pure and representative as possible, if you still have the final choice of showing or not showing, can it ever be unbiased?