Profile on Fleek

Between classes, you may find most students standing in ridiculous food lines or sprinting from one building to another. This interval is where most of us reply to our pending texts and check our Facebook notifications. But with the recent weather, we’re more likely to snap an artsy photo of our stunning campus, a guaranteed eleven likes on Instagram.

With the winter months finally among us, we all know our Instagram feeds will be filled with the “first snow fall”, showing off the photography skills we’ve built from our amateur shots of the changing leaves. Not to mention, it’ll add to our prized Instagram profiles that display an alternate and idyllic versions of ourselves.

So is Instagram our new Facebook, where we dress our profiles up and make them more glamorous then our actual selves?

Considering Facebook has become overcrowded with political opinions, trending topics, and Buzzfeed posts, Instagram sticks to the fundamental design of posting a photo of what you’re doing or where you are.

The simplicity of the platform certainly reflects on how we glamorize our lives. Posting photos after editing them from various external apps makes dropping an Instagram photo the everyday person’s equivalent to dropping an album. It seems that we only post photos revolving around partying, travelling, food, clothes or themed days and if our over processed selfie doesn’t receive a certain amount of likes, we value ourselves off it and, sometimes, delete the post.

Despite our internal debates on if the moment is spectacular enough to capture or if the photo is cute enough to post, we continue to upload our borderline artistic photos to appear more attractive and fun to our peers. Not to mention with the increasing usage of Tinder, Instagram profiles are now the frontier of rating a person compared to their Twitter or Facebook accounts.

With less and less human contact, our amiable profiles speak louder than our personalities. Lest we forget, we don’t really know most of these fashion gurus and fitness enthusiasts, but as long as their profiles are fun and enviable then they have our follow. Right?

Since our Instagram game needs to be strong, the photos we post say a lot about us. Not to mention our like to followers or followers to following ratios needs to balance as well. The unsaid rules behind the game has made us overly conscious about the platform and raises a theoretical bar of what our profiles should look like.

But maybe we set these bars with intentions of rubbing off on our every day lives. Maybe we’ll spend more time admiring nature, enjoying our extravagant meals or even having a quality night with our friends. Who knows why there’s the unsaid rules of Instagram, but as long as we are stay within them we’ll snap away at the falling snow and make our friends envious of our lives… Our projected lives, anyways.