Jill Walker Rettberg's Seeing Ourselves

While research about the relationship between Instagram followers and their friendships in real life, is inconclusive, research about one’s portrayal of themselves on Instagram and how they see themselves in real life proved to be more relative. A person’s portrayal of himself or herself on Instagram directly correlates to how they think of themselves in real life. Users tend to have unrealistic views of themselves on their social media platforms and in their life outside of the app. Users of social media tend to create a persona that only represents the best versions of themselves. While they keep their own identities, they exaggerate the good and minimize the bad qualities of themselves. Thus, social media, especially photo sharing sites …show more content…
Here, Rettberg is commentating on how each picture posted on Instagram is merely a chapter in that person’s autobiography. Since we pick and choose what to post we can therefore filter what it is we want to be shown and what we’d rather hold back. This allows Instagram users to write whatever story they’d like, creating an online persona that may not truly reflect who they are. “If the ways we structure our self-representations are technological filters built into our software and machines, they are also influenced by cultural filters” (Rettberg 35). Rettberg identifies how although there are filters that make a photo visually appealing, the content in the photo being filtered must also be culturally appealing. People are more likely to post a photo that correlates with their society’s cultural standards and one that can “fully correspond to what you want to see in yourself” (Rettberg 43). This creates a pressure to demonstrate a certain identity to the social media world and it gives a person the satisfaction that they fit into society’s standards. People’s autobiographies end up being exactly what we’d like to read and personify, pressuring more and more Instagram users to fall into a fabricated digital