The Politics of Instagram: How important is it to live life with #nofilter?

I love instagram.  I really, really love it.  I firmly believe that the greatest philosophical dilemma of modern times is: if you drink a cocktail and you don’t instagram it, did you drink a cocktail at all?  When it comes to that little rainbow camera icon, I am about as peak millennial as you can get.  I give the baby boomers a reason to call us self-obsessed.

Me, literally using 3 devices to instagram.  Maybe I have a problem.

I realise, though, that living my life through my iPhone camera lens is not uncontroversial.  Last summer, my boyfriend challenged me to go without instagram for a month, and while I managed to not post for a WHOLE 30 DAYS, after a couple of weeks I was back to checking my timeline roughly once an hour.  I just love looking at other people’s lives, shared through a glossy filter.  I have a carefully cultivated feed made up of people I know, accounts I’ve found through twitter or various hashtags, celebrities and bloggers and I love being able to get these peeks into other worlds.  What has never particularly bothered me is the question of reality.  I don’t care if the pristine flatlay someone has posted of their beauty regime is the only tidy part of their room.  If someone posts a selfie of themselves looking gorgeous, when in reality they’ve spent the day in their PJ’s, it doesn’t bother me.  If you need to filter the fuck out of the picture of your beach day to make the sky look blue then go for it.

But I’m beginning to think maybe I’m alone in this, because all I keep reading about at the moment is people saying we need to be more honest about the messiness of our lives online, and particularly on instagram.  The argument is that websites like the ‘gram (cringe) are causing young people to struggle with feelings of inferiority and jealousy.  You’re sitting eating your meal deal lunch on your desk at work, and you see someone from Made in Chelsea posting a hot-dogs-or-legs beach pic from their 18th holiday this year, and it knocks your self esteem.  Why can’t you have their body?  Why can’t you be on a permanant holiday?  The logic makes sense.  There are even some studies claiming instagram is effecting our mental health (although, interestingly, not as much as Facebook).  You can now get a shed-load of media coverage for posting “honest captions” with your idealised instagram photos, revealing how you had to stand on a chair in a busy coffee shop to get the perfect artsy shot.

I’m not convinced that honesty online is as important as articles in the Guardian want us to think it is.  Although I’m sure that there are some people instagram does negatively effect, I imagine most people understand that sometimes shots will be posed, and sometimes things will be edited.  We all know a good Valencia filter will improve a selfie, and we’ve all asked a friend or boyfriend to take 25 pictures of us draped casually against a scenic backdrop to get the perfect outfit picture.

For me, I would say that instagram has actually improved my mental health over the last year.  The last 12 months of my life have been incredibly difficult at times, and not at all instragrammable.  I didn’t have a lot of control over the bad things that were happening, I just had to get on with it and do the best I could to cope.  I can’t explain how good it felt to be able to have a place where I could still control something about my life, and about the public perception of myself.  At a time where most people who knew me felt very sorry for me, and most conversations with close friends involved endless talking about the bad stuff, it helped to get away from that.  My instagram account became a place of refuge, where I could post a picture of my restaurant meal, or of the bouquet of flowers my boyfriend had bought me, or a snapshot of the beautiful city I live in.  It was pretty much the only time where I could still have a life which looked enviable, and it was so positive to be able to do that.  It made me feel good at a time when not a lot else did.

Life might be shit but instagram is on fleek.

It might be shallow to admit that instagram is so important to me, but I don’t care.  Every time someone in real life tells me that I have a good instagram account it makes me happy, and so what?!  We shouldn’t be ashamed about things that make us happy.  We shouldn’t feel like we have to stop filtering things or cropping out the annoying person ruining your landscape shot just to appease other people.  As long as you keep smart about how that models thigh gap might not be all it appears then we should all keep editing to our hearts content, if that’s what floats our boat.

Essena O’Neill called instagram ‘contrived perfection’ when criticising the app, but I don’t think there’s anything terribly wrong with that.  The world is going to hell in a handcart at the moment.  My twitter feed is filled with doom and gloom about Brexit, Trump, the horrendous terror attacks and ongoing refugee crisis.  Facebook is filled with people arguing about politics.  Instagram is a refuge of peonies, iced coffee, loved-up couples and amazing travel pictures.  Next to everything else, this is a haven, somewhere to go when real life is shit.  A bit of contrived perfection is okay in my book.