Regardless of what you use Instagram for, there are always accounts out there that make you jealous. It can simply be a friend who always seems to have the money for amazing vacations, a celebrity living the high life, but most of the time it's one of those travel or fitness bloggers who seem to have an idyllic existence.
However, this travel blogger has revealed that when it comes to these Instagram accounts, things may not be what they seem.
Carolyn Stritch, a 32-year-old from the UK, has over 190,000 followers on Instagram. She shocked them all this week when she revealed that her recent posts had been a complete lie - but not just for kicks. In fact, her followers had unknowingly witnessed a new project of her's which aimed to prove a point about Instagram models and travel bloggers.
First of all she posted a photo of herself in bed, in which she announced her plans to go to Disneyland the next day to celebrate her 22nd birthday. "I'll be by myself, but so what? It'll be my very own fairytale," she wrote, adding: "Human possibilities vastly exceed our imagination!"
The next day she added a perfect shot of herself in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle, with no one else even close to her. "I keep saying to myself: it's kind of fun to do the impossible," she wrote. "Life is what you make it!"
Things started looking a bit different in the next post, however. In a glitchy video, she wrote that she was "not feeling entirely myself after that trip" and promised to publish a blog post to explain everything the following day.
When people tuned in to read the blog post, they realised that the entire story told on Instagram was a fictional one. In a post titled 'Why I hacked my own Instagram account', she explained how she "wanted my fictional narrative to challenge the way I portray myself online and the effects of this portrayal".
She admitted that there are some white lies in previous photos. She doesn't read by the window because it's too cold in her flat, often her coffee cup is empty, she sucks in her stomach and photoshops dirty marks off the walls. So in this project she decided to explore how Instagram users present their "perfect self" online to escape from the reality.
She wrote:
"I came up with a story: my FaceApped perfect self, who’s ten years younger than I am, flies off to Disneyland for the day, and somehow manages to photograph herself all alone in front of Sleeping Beauty’s Castle.
"Nobody wants to see me in my pajamas, with my explosive morning hair, hunched over my laptop on the sofa. That’s how I spend most of my days. You want to see my books, my windows, my travel photography, same as I want to see the best bits of your daily lives."
She says that showing your best self is not a bad thing, but there is a line that shouldn't be crossed - a line that she crossed in the project.
However, she does believe that Instagram can be "a tool for good", as it has given her and others opportunities she never dreamed of otherwise.
So, next time you're feeling jealous of someone on Instagram, think about what their lives are really like behind the filters and photoshop edits.
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