Scott Ross
George Washington University
scottandrewross@gmail.com
Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes,
Images, and Media Ideologies of Value
This article elucidates how some users of the app Instagram follow particular rules—shaped
by the medium’s material constraints and affordances as well as social norms and pressures—
to get as many likes as possible. I demonstrate how my interlocutors, young adult women in
the United States, strategize their Instagram usage with creative practices in an effort to
successfully accrue likes. But the pressure to perform in such a way lead some of them to
create secondary accounts called “fake Instagrams” where these rules could be broken and
users believe they can be more authentic. I analyze the importance of likes to social media use
and how this feature structures the media ideologies users hold. Demonstrating how users
trade the value of likes in one mode of Instagram for the value of authenticity in another, I
show that media ideologies and media switching—conventionally analyzed between media—
occur within them as well. These ideologies determine how users project different selves
within a single medium, selves which are in dialogue with one another on social
media. [social media, media ideology, value, media switching]
“I
nstagram is very time-consuming if you let it be.” This is how one college
student described the popular photo-sharing app. Indeed, while posting to
Instagram is fairly simple, using it can be quite laborious. Frequently
checking it is one way it’s so time-consuming, but once they see a post, users’ options
are actually quite limited—they can like it, comment, or do nothing before scrolling
on. Posting also only takes a few steps—photograph, edit, and post, with optional
filter, caption, and location—but these steps can require considerable effort. Take
Emily, for example. When I asked the college sophomore what posting typically
looked like, she began: “I used to play around more with different apps but now I
pretty exclusively only use VSCO Cam and Aviary, those are my two favorites, and
then there’s one other app that lets you frame your thing, that I have, that’s called
Instafit. So, okay, so that’s three apps.” She laughed at the realization, then
continued:
I use three apps, um, pretty religiously, before I Instagram it, just because it gives you, like,
more freedom and there are different filters and each app has, like, things that it’s better at,
so it’s nice to get exactly what you’re looking for with the photograph. Um, so I’ll, like, I’ll
take a photo or somebody will take a photo of me, and then I’ll just um edit it until I feel
happy with it and then I usually don’t post it right away because I think that captions are
really important. So I’ll wait until I think of a caption, and then I’ll post it when I think that
the caption is adequate.1
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, Vol. 29, Issue 3, pp. 359–374, ISSN 1055-1360, EISSN 1548-1395.
© 2019 American Anthropological Association. DOI: 10.1111/jola.12224.
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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
When I asked if she paid attention to when she posted, Emily cringed. “I do!” she
admitted. “I do think about when to post, because like, if I think of a caption at like
1:00 a.m., I’m not going to—like, because nobody’s up then, nobody’s going to see it
—so, like, I’ll wait until like the late morning or afternoon.” This process, which for
Emily sometimes includes asking friends for advice about filters, running captions by
roommates to see if they’re funny, or texting photos to her sister for her opinion,
culminates in a single Instagram post. Sharing an image with others is a social act, of
course, but here we see that posting to Instagram is a deeply thought out and social
process.
It wasn’t always this way. A few years ago, Emily edited several photos from a
family vacation and posted them all within a two-day period. “I used it more like a
photo album than, like, ‘this is the like quintessential photo for this thing,’ like, there’s
more importance in each photo than I thought.” Over time, she became more
selective in her posting. “There was definitely like a difference in response when I
started posting things—I started to get it—started posting less often, and also started
posting content that not just I would enjoy, but that I enjoyed and wanted to share
with other people.” Since conforming to these norms, however, Emily has felt
constrained by the limits of what she can post on Instagram. While continuing to use
her main Instagram account in this way, she has sought other forms of representation
by turning to a secondary account, her “fake” Instagram or finsta,2 where she shares
more candid moments with just her closest friends.
In 2016, I issued a call at my university for respondents who used Instagram to be
part of a study about finstas. All of the respondents were young women college
students from different parts of the United States, most of whom used multiple
Instagram accounts, several even before college (all were familiar with the practice). I
conducted fifteen open-ended interviews as well as eight “tours” during which I
looked through accounts—some primary, some finsta—asking users questions about
their posts. Interviews centered on image-making and -sharing processes, revealing
complex norms and how to breach them. The data thus comes from a specific time—
Instagram and the broader media ecology have changed since3—and conveys a
particularly gendered experience. This is thus not an exhaustive account of the ways
Instagram is used, but the data presented here is one example of the multifaceted
forms of social media use, focusing on how my interlocutors use a single medium in
divergent ways.
Recent scholarship on social media has developed a better understanding of how
users communicate or perform differently on different platforms—with the idea that,
from a range of options in a media ecology, people hold media ideologies about what
each medium is for based on its structure, limits, and affordances (Gershon 2010a,
2010b). Discerning how people use media requires that we study “how people
understand both the communicative possibilities and the material limitations of a
specific channel” (Gershon 2010a, 283). But these ideologies and choices are not only
made between media. Users have multiple ideologies and switch between different
communicative forms within the same platform, directed at different audiences. Media
ideologies about Instagram create new ways of using the app which have their own
aesthetics, publics, and message.
Ilana Gershon (2010b, 391) defines media ideologies as “people’s beliefs, attitudes,
and strategies about the media they use [and] the assumptions that people hold about
how a medium accomplishes communicative tasks.” These ideologies shape people’s
decisions to switch between media. Building on semiotic (Keane 2003) and linguistic
ideology (Schieffelin et al. 1998), media ideology offers a narrowed focus on the
material limits and possibilities of particular media technologies. The ideologies
people hold about media reveal assumptions about how media work, such as which
media index intimacy (Gershon 2010b; Fisher 2013), which lend themselves to
authenticity (Eisenlohr 2010), and which are perceived to allow for directness
(Kunreuther 2010) or engagement in the public sphere (Vidali 2010). Such
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assumptions about media are particularly evident when it comes to cellular phones
(Dent 2018), as well as the myriad apps they carry.
While new media such as cell phones or apps are freighted with numerous media
ideologies (Dent 2018), such newness is always constructed (Gershon 2017). New
media “emerge from within cultural contexts, and they refashion other media, which
are embedded in the same or similar contexts”—a process Bolter and Grusin
(1999, 17) label remediation, through which media are enmeshed in relation to each
other. But what makes media new is not how recently they emerged but whether
they offer new ways to coordinate utterances, participant structures, and identity
(Gershon 2017). Media ideologies help us see that remediation is not only about the
relation between media, but rather about “the continuities and frictions of certain
media and language ideologies as they are engaged by social actors who are
evaluating, using, and producing a range of media and communication modalities”
(Vidali 2010, 373).
My interlocutors’ assumptions and expectations about Instagram dictated how
they communicated on the app. These constraints pushed them to create another
genre of Instagram with its own audience and affordances, which they switched
between regularly. These different ideologies and switching practices occur within
what is typically described as a single medium. The media ideologies that users
have about one type of Instagram versus the other shape the ways that they
understand the affordances and limits of Instagram in each instance. These varying
perceptions of media and their purposes are shaped by the type of publics that they
speak to.
Warner (2002, 50) describes a public which “comes into being only in relation to
texts and their circulation” and “exists by virtue of being addressed.” A message is
engaged through its medium—be it a journal article or an Instagram post—and
carries with it the constraints and affordances of that medium. An Instagram public,
for example, exists on the app, enabling particular types of communication shaped by
social norms about the medium as well as its material capabilities. Warner’s public is
not merely an audience, but is “a dynamic mode of subjectivity associated with text
production and reception,” an orientation to such texts “endowed with particular
rhythms of call and response” (Dent 2018, 582). My interlocutors engage in multiple
Instagrams according to their own rhythms and expectations, working to accumulate
likes or express authenticity in different instances. As the media ideologies my
interlocutors had about Instagram became too strict, they did not attempt to break
taboos on their accounts, nor did they abandon the app altogether—instead they
turned to finstas. In their view, on Instagram one has to put forth an image that is
aesthetically pleasing, funny, or interesting. Finstas, by contrast, allow users to be selfdeprecating, goofy, or ugly. The taboos of Instagram can be traversed on finsta; by
using a “fake” account, one could be more real. In this way, finstas might be conceived
of as parallel or counter publics which exist alongside and are entangled with other
genres of Instagram. Dewey (2009, 124–125) describes the parallel public sphere as
one which allows minoritized groups to discuss taboos, but “is neither subversive nor
a complete instrument of domination” because it “is as much a consequence of
oppression as an agent of it.” In a different context and manner, finstas act as a sort of
parallel public insofar as women use them to break free from constraints of
representation on their main Instagram accounts. They use finstas to speak back to the
expectations of an Instagram media ideology which demands that they post only
beautiful, witty, likable content, in a society that regularly dictates how women are
seen. But they do so not instead of conforming to norms on Instagram, but while
continuing to perform and conform to that set of expectations on their main
Instagrams. The two forms of Instagram are deeply tied to each other, as how people
think Instagram should be used is at the heart of why finstas exist.
In recent years, youth have migrated away from social media platforms like
Facebook towards Instagram and Snapchat.4 Yet we have little understanding of how
people use Instagram. The practice of using two Instagram accounts has proliferated
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
in the social circles of American youth for whom Instagram is an important part of
socializing. By looking at these examples of social media use, we can examine new
forms of self-representation and specific ideologies and practices of social media use
that reveal how users understand the multiplicities of social media as channels for
communication. Instagram involves both production and consumption, and building
and maintaining social relations online have rightly been viewed through the lens of
labor;5 in some instances the value that this labor seeks to gain is embodied in the like,
while in other instances it is concerned with realness. Attending to this labor and its
motivations reveals the nuances of social media communication.
In this article, I explore the impetus behind the posting practices outlined above,
the labor and creativity that goes into making successful Instagram posts, and how
some users have sought to practice Instagram otherwise through finstas. My main
argument is that, despite having a range of media choices, social media users can
hold multiple media ideologies within a single medium, engaging in different ways of
communicating on the same channel through intra-platform media switching. I
contrast their primary accounts, used to accrue value by gaining likes, with their
finstas, where they enact a sort of authenticity. This reformulates theoretical concepts
about media ideologies, media switching, and remediation to occur not only between
but within channels of communication. It thus also challenges what constitutes a
discrete medium, as users toggle between different forms of communication within
what is thought to be a single channel. In the first section, I argue that Instagram
imbues images with a particular form of value, the like, which shapes how and why
they post on the platform. The social practices and strategies deployed by users in
pursuit of likes is described in the second section, where I explore how users try to
produce content to be liked. In the third section, I show how, finding this ideology
and practice too constraining, some used a new genre of Instagram, the finsta, and I
explore how they navigate between these two social media forms. By looking at these
forms, we can understand the complexities of the social media landscape and how
users navigate them, tacking from one form of communication to another as needed.
One way of communicating can fill the gaps of another, even in the same medium,
reshaping the medium itself in the process.
Media Ideologies of Instagram: “The Likes Factor”
Emily’s posting process is not uncommon. Lauren explained: “Everything I do on
Instagram is pretty much strategic.” Communicating on Instagram is not as simple as
uploading a picture—getting the filter, caption, and timing right takes work. In
speaking with youth in and out of this study, a media ideology requiring that
Instagram posts be carefully curated emerged frequently. Part of this ideology is
structured by Instagram itself, as manifested in the ability to like pictures.6 When
posting an image, many said they think seriously about whether or not others would
like it. The life of an image extends beyond the moment of its creation and is “marked
through successive moments of consumption across space and time” (Edwards 2012,
222).7 Each viewer who does or does not like an image shapes its social biography.
The social lives of images on Instagram are deeply entangled in processes of
production and reception as well as economies of attention, consumption, and
appreciation. Central to these is a now ubiquitous feature of social media: the like (see
also Gerlitz and Helmond 2013).
Scarlet described her thought process in these terms: “I want to be original and be
myself, but I also want to try and post something that is guaranteed to get a good
amount of likes.” The importance of likes is an example of how “the structure of a
technology helps to shape the participant structure brought into being through its
use” (Gershon 2010a, 285). As technology writer Navneet Alang (2016) says, one’s
audience on social media “is a thing you forever create and that creates you at the
same time. To have an audience at all is to be relentlessly concerned with how you
will be read.” As users post—on Instagram and elsewhere—they seek likes from this
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audience. This process was evident in Ann’s succinct theorization: “The reason we all
use Instagram is for the likes factor, um, and to make sure people are recognizing us
and seeing us how we want to be seen. . . Likes, that’s like the whole purpose of
Instagram.” These users strategized how best to present themselves in order to attain
more likes (Goffman 1956).
Likes are central to the formulation of the media ideology described here. But, as
we will see below, it isn’t the only way of using Instagram, and in fact has pushed
some adherents to create other forms of Instagram. If each app exists in relation to
other choices (Gershon 2010a), this multiplication of Instagram forms complicates
where we delineate media when discussing media ecology, media ideology, and
media switching. When describing her Instagram accounts, Scarlet elaborated two
distinct types of speech on the same platform:
I am pretty specific about what I post on my main Instagram. There’s a lot of thought that
goes into what I post. . . I post pictures of me with other people when I think I look good or
it’s a nice picture in an interesting setting. . . Ultimately finding the balance between being
myself, showing variety in what I post when I can, and gaining likes is what drives my
posts. . .
My finsta is an entirely different story. I post things on finsta of funny things I’ve experienced
or witnessed. It’s usually texts between my family members and I, or a selfie of me with a
concise but detailed overview of something that’s happened to me. . . I am completely myself
on finsta and don’t care about likes or anything.
Each account has its own ideology, and each one portrays a different self shaped
by this ideology. If technology structures how people use it, this isn’t lost on users
themselves. “It is not. . . that I am simply lost in the frippery of the everyday,” Alang
(2016) reflects in his essay on subjectivity and social media. “Rather, each platform
offers broad structural and economic incentives for me to perform in a particular
way.” Instagram is a way to share moments in visual form—with priority going to
the big event, the beautiful vacation, the nice meal—what Alang describes as “the
beautiful and the conspicuously consumed.” Users are keenly aware that social
media shapes their subjectivity. While describing the posting process, Emily called it
“a game” that needed to be played, and Lauren called herself “crazy” for how she
used Instagram. Instagram is not merely a structure that imposes constraints on
users, but users actively create these constraints, while also working strategically to
navigate them well.
Instagram’s likes operate similar to voting on Reddit, where Banks (2013) argues
that votes do not “highlight the best content” but rather “build and maintain
hegemony.” On Reddit, the number of votes a post receives moves it up or down the
page, increasing the visibility of popular posts. Similarly, Instagram’s algorithmic
newsfeed promotes popular content, prioritizing content it thinks each user will
enjoy (or like?).8 I go further, arguing that because users seek likes, they notice the
number of likes posts receive, and act accordingly. The more that people post to
Instagram with likes in mind, the more likes shape what they post. These preferences
are learned through practice, as Scarlet suggested: “These rules are learned from
experience with posting as well as looking at other people’s Instagrams. When we see
something we like, we follow suit. When we don’t, we learn to avoid it.” It is in this
way that the structure of Instagram shapes how users present themselves online, to
the extent that many of my interlocutors would conflate their own opinion about
what constituted a good picture with what would receive likes.
Looking at the way likes shape posting practices also sheds light on the broader
visual economy at play. Deborah Poole’s concept of visual economy helps us see
“images as part of a comprehensive organization of people, ideas, and objects” (1997,
8). When posting to Instagram, users are thinking of what constitutes a good image
and what it says about them, but also how their audience will respond to it. When I
asked Scarlet whether she asked for advice on posting, she said that such
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
conversations “are more based around the question, ‘Do you think I should
Instagram this?’ which is basically asking whether the picture is worthy of being
posted. I think both the question of whether the picture has likes potential and if it’s
generally just a good picture are implied in that one question.” These two questions
are one and the same: if a picture is good, it should get likes; if people like something,
it must be good. Instagram’s features structure what is “worthy” through the
expectation of likes—an image’s “likes potential.” Such thinking anticipates an image’s
value in the visual economy of Instagram.
In their discussion of the ways Facebook’s like feature changed the internet, Gerlitz
and Helmond (2013) look at how such social buttons reorganized web content and
traffic around social media (rather than the preceding hit and link economy) and
changed the nature and production of economic value on the internet. One effect of
this change is that likes “transform users’ affective, positive, spontaneous responses to
web content into. . . a number on the Like counter and are made comparable” (1358;
see also Thayne 2012; Paasonen 2016). I am interested in this process, through which
Instagram’s like function produces a quantifiable value in the post itself, and how the
quest for that value structures the ways that users post and view their posts.
When I asked Lauren to show me some of her favorite posts, she immediately
responded: “Well, I know which one got the most likes” and selected a photo from a
family trip. Half blue sky and half blue sea, the image is centered on Lauren wading
in the water. It signifies both an artistic eye and an economic and social privilege that
allows for travel. That Lauren’s first response when asked about this photo was to
refer to its likes—her first post to get over two hundred—demonstrates the conflation
of liking an image and liking an image. Over the course of its social life, accruing likes
had made the image more valuable. This is another example of the features of
Instagram shaping users’ ways of seeing.
Several interlocutors expected to receive likes from particular people, especially
close friends. In one interview, Lauren feigned frustration at not garnering more likes:
“It’s got to be like at least a hundred [likes]. And, like, my friend and I, we’ll always
be like, ‘why aren’t more people liking it? Like, we deserve so many more likes, this is
so annoying.’” When I asked what happened if she didn’t get many likes, she replied:
“I’ll just get like really pissed, and I’ll be like, ‘I like all of your pictures, why is no one
liking [mine]?’” Her mock angry tone elided a quite real belief in a system of
reciprocity. Later, she described her “loyal likers” as people she can count on to like
her posts. Audrey described how a roommate asked if she had seen a post—one that
she had in fact seen, but had not liked—and the awkwardness of negotiating the
obligation to like friends’ photos. It is not enough for followers to see your post as a
passive audience; liking is itself a communicative act in response to a post, and is
central to that post’s successful reception. Here we see the reciprocity of likes—
obligations to give and receive among close friends, and feelings of earned
entitlement to a particular amount of attention, and thus, value. If likes are gifts of
appreciation, they are gifts one is obligated to give but can also demand, depending
on social relations (Mauss 1990 [1950]).
To the extent that Instagram images exist within a visual economy, the currency in
this economy is the attention and engagement of one’s followers, manifested in the
like (Goldhaber 1997; Roberts 2012; Terranova 2012; Citton 2017). A public is, after all,
“only realized through active uptake” and requires an attentive audience (Warner
2002, 60). Attention is a sign of value, and for many this attention is measured not in
views but likes. In this visual/gift/attention economy, the exchange of likes stands in
for the value of the image itself, shaping and mediating relations through the
platform. Getting liked makes a post more valuable; the act of liking itself produces
value.9 The Instagram post is not only about the content being circulated, but about
who sees it and how they interact with it—or don’t.
“To address a public, we don’t go around saying the same thing to all of these
people. We say it in a venue of indefinite address and hope that people will find
themselves in it” (Warner 2002, 59). Instagram is one such venue, wherein users
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address their feeds and hope to catch their followers’ attention and garner likes
(Citton 2017). And when those hopes are dashed? “I’ve gotten so concerned about
how many likes something will get. . . that I’ll take a picture down less than a minute
after posting it,” Scarlet admitted. When I asked her to elaborate, she explained: “On
my real Instagram, I have around 650 followers, so I sort of expect anything I post to
get several likes in the first few minutes. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll probably take it
down.” If an image accrues likes, it is successful; if not, it fails. Emily said that if a post
got no likes in the first few minutes, she would “take it down and just kind of pretend
it didn’t happen, and I’ll post it later when I think more people will be online.” This is
one way that likes shape what is posted and when, what remains and what gets
deleted. But recall that Scarlet asked her friends if something had “likes potential”—if
the answer was no, she wouldn’t have posted it in the first place. In order to get
posted on Instagram, and to stay there, an image must elicit a response from its
viewers; it must be liked. If your friend sees a post without liking it, did she even see
it?
The speed with which my interlocutors decided the fate of failed posts is no
surprise in what is perceived to be the compressed temporality of social media. One
characteristic of a cellular public, according to Dent (2018) is the “increased cycle of
interaction such that the time between an initiation of communication and a response
to that initiation becomes almost instantaneous.” Paraphrasing Warner, Dent (2018,
593) suggests that “the fact that a participant comes to anticipate a certain periodicity
of call and response becomes crucial to the way she experiences a given public.” My
interlocutors’ anticipation of likes meant that second thoughts about posts must move
quickly to erase failed communicative acts. Thus, in an effort to maximize attention
(i.e., likes), users plan not only what they post, but when. When Emily admitted to
thinking about when to post, she explained: “maybe I’ll post like right at 9:30 because
people are probably like waiting for their 9:35 [class] to start or something.” Time
may already be compressed with the supposed immediacy of the internet, but the
importance of likes raises the stakes.
“To become occupied by a social network is to internalize its gaze,” Alang (2016)
writes. “It is to forever carry a doubled view of both your own mind and the
platform’s.” It is in this gaze, the likes factor media ideology, that we see how
Instagram structures the production and circulation of images, while also acting as a
system through which images are evaluated and assigned value. This leads us to “ask
not what specific images mean but, rather, how images accrue value” (Poole 1997, 10).
The answer, laid bare by each of my interlocutors, is in the likes.
“The Science of Instagram”
If images get value from likes, the question remains of what users choose to post—
what they think will get liked. Audrey referred to finding the “perfect balance” of
image, editing, caption, and timing as “master[ing] the science of Instagram.”
Following this metaphor, I draw attention to how Instagram users attempt to craft
successful communicative acts through studied experience of Instagram usage,
following the social lives of posts to determine if an image is valuable. Images are
“specifically made to have social biographies” (Edwards 2012, 222), each indexing an
experience and eliciting reactions from viewers; as images are liked and commented
on, these biographies deepen. If likes are “the whole purpose of Instagram,” then
getting your audience to like images is crucial. In this section I describe users’ posting
practices as part of a method that includes planning or selecting images, expertly
editing them, formulating captions, and timing posts. These steps, outlined in Emily’s
words in the introduction and further described here, are part of an effort to create
successful Instagram posts.
If Instagram is a science to be mastered, my interlocutors would be lay experts in
the field. Not corporate or celebrity accounts with tens of thousands of followers,
these young women circulate snippets of their lives among hundreds of friends and
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
acquaintances. This included a method learned through tested experience, consulting
with others, and identifying authorizing studies for guidance. Instagram becomes
both the tool with which users establish expertise and the medium through which
they perform that expertise.
In terms of subject matter, most common were images of people or scenic views—
often marking special occasions. Parties, vacations, school events, adventures, and
time with friends or family all warranted documentation. One motif was an attempt
to impress others. Ann, whose home is by the beach in Florida, described a common
theme on her Instagram as “I live where you vacation.” Her Instagram archive since
summer ended was mostly groups of people at parties and events that indexed a
social life at college. The dominant message of people’s posts, which signaled social
status, location, wealth, or beauty, could be summed up as a performance of how
“cool” one was, demonstrating a level of social capital.
In order to depict these experiences in a manner that maximized likes, images had to
be edited. Each of my interlocutors had their own aesthetic, but all mentioned editing—
but not too much. Emily acknowledged that under-edited, grainy photos were “just
bad,” but warned about the use of filters, pre-made editing tools that adjusted
brightness, warmth, contrast, and other aspects of images: “Filters can be great, filters
can do wonders, amazing things filters can do. But if you like use them too much or too
strongly or too many of them at once it just—the integrity of the photo [is covered].” The
idea that editing tools might overshadow the image itself was premised on its integrity—
the value of the image being prepared for dissemination, but also its potential to accrue
value in likes. In numerous interviews the filter emerged as a double-edged tool that
could improve an image if used correctly, but could easily send the message that one
was trying too hard. In order to make an image look nice, but not over-edited, several
interlocutors deployed an array of apps. Bringing together multiple tools to edit images,
they engaged in a sort of thick photography (Deger 2016, 112). Images went through
multiple apps prior to being shared, and once posted to one’s feed, followers’ likes and
comments continued to shape an image’s social biography.
The aesthetics of an image are partially determined by the editing tools available.
But it was not only affordances but also limitations of the app that shaped how users
decided to post. Captions, for example, needed to be funny or touching in order to
accrue likes, but also had to remain short. If a caption was more than three lines, the
app abbreviated it, and according to my interlocutors nobody would read past the
“. . .more” button that abridged long captions—the app’s structure dictated how long
a worthwhile caption should be. This is but one example in which the functions of the
app actually constrain how likes-seeking users utilize its features.
In describing her Instagram process, Lauren admitted planning posts ahead of
time with her friend: “If we’re going somewhere where I know I’m going to
Instagram, we’re like actually crazy, but we’ll be like, ‘okay, we have to get us doing
this.’” Others described similar plans. This is emblematic of what Jurgenson (2011)
calls social media’s tendency to make users “view the present as an always
potentially documented past.” Instagram shapes the ways of seeing that people enact
as vacations, parties, and meals become something to be shared visually as markers
of “coolness.” This is not a particularly new way of seeing, of course (see Derrida
1995), but because of its popularity, Instagram has had a scalar effect on how people
interact with the world and share experiences. This anticipation of posting to
Instagram, through planning what to post and when, demonstrates the temporal
element of Instagram use. When Emily explained why she posted when her friends
were a captive audience waiting for class to start, she supported this by telling me she
had “read a lot of articles about” when to post. Scarlet told me she “saw a study once
that 6:00 p.m. on Wednesday is the best time to post.” In this way they gestured
towards expertise as they tried to create likable posts (see Carr 2010).
Each post is placed in the user’s archive to be viewed anytime. I use the term archive
deliberately, countering Miller’s assertion that “as there are no albums for storage [on
Instagram], all interaction is transient and communicative, so the central role of
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memorialization is gone” (2015, 8; 2016, 87). If you follow someone, you can see their
posts on your newsfeed or you can visit their account and see everything they’ve
posted. In fact, with the recent increase of ads and implementation of an algorithmic
rather than chronological feed during research, several people mentioned going to
specific accounts to see updates, signaling a move away from the newsfeed and towards
the archive.10 Indeed, almost all of my interlocutors mentioned the importance of being
able to go back and look at their posts. One even referred to this as “stalking myself,” a
nod to the act of “stalking” others by digging into their online histories
Because this archive also appears on the feeds of followers, it creates a particular
politics to posting. There is a sort of courtesy in posting selectively in order to avoid
overwhelming or annoying followers. This social norm is the double-post taboo. The
injunction of this media ideology is to encapsulate one’s experiences into a single post
—recall Emily’s realization that each moment needed a “quintessential photo” as she
learned new norms on Instagram. Everyone I spoke with noted the taboo of posting
to Instagram more than once a day. Several noted that doing this would mean you
get less likes or even lose followers for clogging up feeds. The inability to double-post
shapes Instagram use in numerous ways. When discussing the taboo, Emily
explained how she might delay certain posts in order to observe the rule: “At times,
like, later in the day I’ll take another really cool photo, but then I’m like, ‘Oh, I’ll just
post it tomorrow. I’ll just let this one have today and then I’ll let that one have
tomorrow.” To avoid the taboo, each image should have its own day, its own time to
shine and be seen and be liked.
If the delayed post is one way of adjusting social media use to fit this media
ideology, others found innovative ways to tell stories in a single post.11 Captions and
location tags become ways to index experiences beyond the content of the image
itself. Looking through her Instagram archive, Scarlet showed me a post from a
weekend spent in New York. The image was of her and her brother on the Brooklyn
Bridge, but the location was “Book of Mormon, Broadway, New York, NY.” She told
me that the location tag was “so people could understand why I was saying
something weird” in the caption, which had nothing to do with the Brooklyn Bridge,
but rather was a quote from the musical. Image, location, and caption all indexed the
same weekend trip—but different aspects of it. Here we see that different pieces of a
post do not necessarily come together directly, but reflect on one another in
innovative ways. In another creative use of the location tag, Audrey showed me her
favorite picture—an unedited, eye-catching picture of her hiking, surrounded by
bright green grass and yellow flowers in the foreground with snow-topped
mountains behind. It was only later that I realized the location for the post was the
university library. The caption? “Wish I was hiking here instead of up the stairs in
[the library]”—a single post signaled both what she was doing as well as her nostalgia
for something different.
It is in this way, through creative deployment of other attributes beyond the
image, that “thick photography sets things, people, and places in relationship”
(Deger 2016, 128). Instagram-posting is not just about indexing past occurrences but
also “creative remediation on the present moment” (114). It is not only an image but
is the confluence of image, caption, and other practices. Tagging a friend who
couldn’t make it to dinner or using a hashtag for a wedding, for example, are ways
users can index people and things beyond what is in an image. This complicates what
constitutes an image, and what becomes possible when posting within the constraints
of Instagram—both those imposed by the structure of the platform itself and those
imposed by particular media ideologies.
Switching to “Fake” Instagram
These unwritten rules on Instagram—equal parts constricting genre and like-seeking
strategy—dictate that one post aesthetically pleasing pictures (of friends, events) with
witty captions (but not too long), edited (but not too much), at the best time of day
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
(for a wider audience), but not too often (never double-post). All of this is done to
maximize likes. There are plenty of Instagram users who don’t follow or even know
these rules, of course, but for the young adults and teenagers who do, these rules can
be constricting. To free themselves from these constraints they have turned to “fake”
Instagram (finsta).
Instagram, like any platform, includes rules and places where the rules fall away.
People use finstas to present themselves on Instagram otherwise, making a clear break
from the media ideology of their main Instagram accounts. The intertextual gaps (Briggs
and Bauman 1992) between finstas and primary Instagrams are noticeable, signaling a
departure from the constraints of stringent media ideologies in favor of a supposedly
freer mode of communication. Lauren explained that “there’s a clear difference” between
the two. When I asked what her accounts said about her, she replied:
For Insta and, like, Facebook and every other like kind of public social media account, like I
feel like there’s always been that issue. . . like it’s not your real life, it’s like just highlighting
the good parts about what you do. . . I’m not a person who’s going to just, like, post a
picture. Like, I’m really like detail-oriented about it and showing you what I’m doing, where
I’m doing it, who I’m doing it with, like, this is a cool thing that I’m doing, this is my cool life,
whatever. But for finsta, it’s more like an actual thing – like your actual life, it’s not like you’re
hiding behind some filter, saying “look at me; I’m so cool.”
In sketching out an alternative space, users created a parallel public (Dewey 2009)
that acts as a place for inside jokes, self-deprecation, and storytelling—a place to be,
several noted, who you really are. Finstas were described as “a judgement-free zone,”
an “intimate community,” a place to “be yourself.” This stemmed from the finsta
audience being significantly smaller. While a typical Instagram account might be
followed by hundreds of friends, family, acquaintances, and classmates, a finsta was a
more intimate space where one could be herself around a few dozen close friends. In
this sense finstas were a form of backstage (Goffman 1956) relative to their primary
Instagram accounts. In outlining these differences, Emily noted that her “Instagram is
for me, yes, but it’s also, it’s me sharing my thoughts and like my world, with the
public, this [finsta] is just me sharing my thoughts and my world with my intimate
friends.” Because of this intimacy, she could break from her conventional media
ideology: “I’ve posted finstas where it’s like a really dumb photo and then like a
paragraph [caption], whereas I would never do that for an Instagram.” While the
meticulously edited photos on Instagram are, in Lauren’s words, “not your real life,”
on finsta photos are less perfect, and therefore give some semblance of being “more
real.” By releasing users from the stringent rules of Instagram, finstas offer a different—
and according to them, more authentic—way of mediating the self. The motives
behind finstas and the self represented on them were markedly different than typical
Instagrams; finstas allowed users to reject the gendered and class-based social
expectations placed on their more public-facing personae.
While primary accounts are highly curated, edited, and focused on getting likes,
finstas were described as the opposite. Emily’s finsta is “fairly self-deprecating” and
features “ugly photos of me, or dumb selfies” where the caption can be as long as she
wants, she rarely uses filters, and she can post more than once a day. Ann said that
she “couldn’t care less about likes” on her finsta (recall that likes were “the whole
purpose” of her Instagram). Scarlet echoed this: “I enjoy [finsta] because it’s very
much a chance to just be like, ‘I don’t really care what I look like’. . . I don’t care how
I’m perceived in this instance, I just want – I want to be appreciated, uh just, no filter,
raw, and people appreciate it just for the content versus the um outward
appearance.” To escape the pressure of likes was a welcome reprieve for someone
whose main account sought them relentlessly. The expectations of how they were
read led my interlocutors to carve out a new space where they could act otherwise;
finstas offered respite from the social expectations of Instagram, class and gendered
pressure to impress with beautiful portraits and envious locations—Scarlet said “you
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want to put on your best face” in Instagram, but her finsta was replete with pictures
that were “not very flattering.”
“I try to be as ugly as I can in the photo,” she said, describing her finsta aesthetic as
“the side eye and the funny face.” If all the photos were similar, then, it was the captions
that set each post apart. Glancing through Scarlet’s recent finsta posts gave me a sense of
the stories she was sharing—self-deprecating accounts of awkward experiences. She
congratulated a friend for getting an inheritance when a beloved grandparent died. She
“almost killed” her boyfriend by accidentally triggering a food allergy. When I asked
about the relationship between image and caption, she said “I think the image doesn’t
really matter, as long as you have something to back it up” (i.e., a good story). But if it
doesn’t matter, then why all the selfies? She found satisfaction in disrupting the norm:
“You’re used to seeing me smiling or whatever and then you see me just making the
ugliest face possible.” Both accounts are in dialogue as performed selves and “real”
(differently performed) selves reflect on one another implicitly, one performing to be
consumed and the other critiquing the likes-seeking project. This dialogue becomes
explicit elsewhere. When I asked Emily if she used filters on her finsta, she described a
joke that drew attention to these intertextual gaps:
One time a friend and I were at a party and we took a bunch of photos together and I
Instagrammed one that was, like, a good photo and then one photo was like an outtake
where our faces were all blurry and messed up and we looked, like, horrible, but I edited it
as if it were like a legit photo, and then posted it to my finsta to like, kind of, like as a joke.
Emily’s joke is premised upon different media ideologies. Thus, the finsta post can
be read as critiquing the editing process and the competition to impress, which Emily
described as “a game” she played to try to get likes. Similarly, Ann’s deployment of
this strategy—circulating similar images on both accounts—served to draw attention
to the labor that went into getting pictures to be perfect. Home for Thanksgiving, she
posted a photo of herself with two friends, captioned “So thankful for friends.” But
she also posted a blurry picture from moments earlier, captioned “‘Take a fucking
photo!’” on her finsta:
We tried so hard to like take a good picture of like the three of us. . . But then we like kept
getting photobombed, kept on like—the flash was terrible, the lighting was awful, and we’re
finally just yelling at the camera, like “come on dude,” like, you know, “just take a fucking
photo!”
If their media ideologies of Instagram required perfection, my interlocutors’ finstas
allowed them to contrast or critique this with ugly and blurry pictures.
Finsta posts reject the primacy of the image through ugly pictures and pictures that
“don’t matter.” One of Lauren’s recent posts had a long caption explaining how she had
accidentally started a fire in her apartment. The image paired with it? A meme about
necklaces. When I expressed surprise at this, Lauren repeated that the image didn’t
matter on finsta. Looking at another post, she said: “I needed a picture, and like I didn’t
know what else to do, so I did one of my dog.” She then walked me through her finstaposting process, scrolling through photographs, text message and Snapchat screenshots, and saved memes. “Let’s say I’m making a post, like, ‘oh I’m being interviewed
for my finsta, blah blah blah,’ I’d go through and be like, ‘what picture do I use?’” She
kept scrolling. “I’d just go through and pick one that, like, not even really fits best, but
just like I’d want to show or like think is funny, or like if I can’t think of anything. . . my
dog.” She continued scrolling, then stopped and laughed. “Or, mini pretzels.”
In escaping the constraints of chasing likes, several interlocutors had fled to a genre
where images “didn’t matter”—on an image-sharing platform. Instagram is such a
central part of sociality that even a rejection of its norms takes place on the very app
that it refuses. But ugly selfies and memes—while unrelated to the stories told in the
captions—are ready-at-hand to be posted and, viewed as such, convey a sort of
intimacy (or realness) to followers.12 Instagram and finstas construct and share
different versions of the self with different publics; performances both “fake” and
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
“real.” While finstas push against the app’s norms, they are still part of Instagram, just as
Warner’s counterpublics and Dewey’s parallel public sphere are still entangled in
dominant publics. Many people follow friends’ main accounts and finstas, so newsfeeds
blend hyper-edited content with the spontaneous, the frank, and the silly. It is in this
convergence that the divide between media ideologies—the intertextual gaps of
Instagram—become clearest. My interlocutors were keenly aware that they were
projecting multiple selves through the same platform. Even the very notion that one
could be more “real” on “fake” Instagram is shot through with hyper-awareness of the
performative nature of social media. The labor of maintaining an online persona
sometimes means “orchestrating a single self-presentation across” multiple platforms
(Gershon 2014, 282), but here it works in reverse, crafting multiple personae within the
same platform. For my interlocutors, their primary Instagram accounts aren’t false
versions of themselves—both their primary accounts and their finstas are different selfrepresentations that they have crafted for different purposes and audiences (Goffman
1956). These two selves operate in dialogue and share space on the same platform.
Our social media selves are not only a form of performance (Goffman 1956), but
have recently been conceived of as animation (Silvio 2010; Manning and Gershon
2013; Gershon 2014). Animation implies a “projection of the self into the environment,” an object that is simultaneously both the self and not (Silvio 2010, 426), such as
gaming avatars or Facebook profiles (Manning and Gershon 2013). The selves we
portray aren’t our “true” selves, but this doesn’t make them any less real. Social
media personae aren’t merely virtual creations, but are instances where “online and
offline personas are seamlessly intertwined” (Manning and Gershon 2013, 126). The
idea that what people post to Instagram is only part of their real lives is assumed by
most. Finsta accounts are another. Facebook and Twitter are others, as are workplace
personae and happy hour personae.
While the front stage of performance theory allows a performer to mask the labor
(or lack thereof) that occurs behind the scenes (Goffman 1956, 71), animation theory
draws our attention to how characters are produced through a collective endeavor
(Silvio 2010, 427–42; Gershon 2017). Instagram posts depict particular versions of the
self, and these depictions are often shaped by multiple people. Recall that Scarlet
sometimes asked friends about “likes potential” before posting. Consultation and coauthorship are part of the collaborative science of making the perfect post (Silvio
2010). But even the everyday maintenance of social media profiles is an act of
animation, as Gershon (2014) notes in her study of how people maintain online selves
while on the job search, managing what appears on their online profiles to keep the
personae presented there consistent, appropriate, and hirable. Your Facebook profile
is what you post, but it’s also what your friends post on your profile, what they tag
you in, what groups you’re part of. Similarly, the self curated on Instagram is made
up of posts, but also likes, comments, and tagged photos. Not only do people fashion
self-representations to attain likes, but likes constitute and animate these images.
Instagram posts are “the creatures of collectives, rather than auteurs” (Silvio 2010,
428)—created collaboratively and, once posted, further animated by likes and
comments which add to their social biography (Edwards 2012).
According to Silvio (2010, 428), performance theory was limited by the notion that
“one body can only inhabit one role at a time,” compared to animation in which
multiple bodies can inhabit a single role, such as the coauthorship above, or a single
author takes up multiple personae, as with Instagrams and finstas. These two
personae exist in relation to one another, and not only in the critical register
referenced above; Lauren described another example of this dialogic relationship:
I had an Instagram when we went to spring break last year, we went to Greece, my friend
and I, and we like posted this picture and it took like an hour to try to get this picture. And so
like there’s this picture of me, like, climbing on a rock, like, looking so stupid, like so I posted
on Instagram and then literally posted [on finsta], like, the picture of me climbing the rock,
like, “hahaha,” like, “this is what it took, go like my picture.”
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Here, Lauren’s finsta acts as a behind-the-scenes snapshot of her more curated
post, a self-deprecating comment on it, and promotional material. The two accounts,
while addressing different publics with different images, are in dialogue. For close
friends who follow both accounts, the images circulate alongside one another,
speaking to each other. The ability to break her Instagram media ideology without
leaving the medium itself—media switching within a given medium—allows Lauren
to speak to multiple, overlapping publics. Such media switching techniques expand
our understanding of how communications operate within given media.
Media switching also leads, however, to the possibility of accidental media switching,
wherein critiques of particular ideologies may simply become failed communicative
acts. Operating multiple accounts forces users to toggle back and forth, leaving room for
error as a user might forget which account she’s logged into. “I’ve done that,” Lauren
said with a laugh. “It’s really embarrassing.” Giving a hypothetical example, she made
a grumpy face and gestured taking a selfie, narrating a caption: “ugh, forgot to study for
my test.” “But it’s like your rinsta, and everyone’s like: ‘oh my god!’ Like everyone will
comment: ‘rinsta!’, like ‘Lauren, this is rinsta!’, like ‘delete! delete!’” This distinction
renders the post a faux pas—if such ideologies didn’t exist or were illegible to followers,
it might just be a bad photo—but it cues finsta-saavy followers to correct the behavior,
further normalizing what belongs where.
The opposite mistake can have consequences too. When Emily’s a capella group
went to a recording studio, she posted a picture of herself standing at the
microphone, with lights splashing off the wall behind her, and captioned it with
lyrics from a song that she had arranged. It had all the trappings of a perfect
Instagram post, but the results were disappointing.
I posted a photo that was really, really cool, and had really cool colors and was like: “aww
yeah, this one’s going to get a lot of likes, this is such a cool photo, like, I want people to
appreciate it, it’s so cool.” And it got like seven likes. And I was like: “what did I do? Why is
this flopping so much?” And then I turned to my friend Talia and was like: “Talia, what’s
going on?” And she was like: “I was so confused when you did that—you posted that on
your finsta. It was such a cool photo, why didn’t you post it on your real insta?”
A proud statement became a whisper to close friends. Such breaches—in either
direction—result in awkward moments, delayed praise, or missed opportunities. For
all its potential, media switching within the same platform creates occasions for
mistaken speech.
Conclusion
Each social media platform has a different purpose, audience, style, and animated self.
People select one depending on what they want. For Gershon (2010b, 393) media
switching occurs between different technologies, but here we see it happening within
them. Multiple accounts emerge as needed, whenever someone desires having a new
outlet on the same platform. The media ideologies that lead to this multiplication of
accounts determines what types of affordances and limits that media has for that user:
the limits of Instagram’s caption length disappear if you’re posting to finsta, and the
many options to edit images are rarely used for a genre of Instagram that doesn’t care
about likes. In this way, what is typically seen as a single medium—Instagram—blurs
into multiple forms. If “each medium is distinctive in enabling some participant
structures. . . rather than others” (Gershon 2017, 16), existing media can also be
refashioned into new forms.
Users engaging in media switching are “not only moving from one channel to
another, but often are also actively deciding against other possible channels”
(Gershon 2010b, 393). Certain things just don’t belong on Instagram. But instead of
switching to another app, users have chosen to create another form of Instagram. One
media switching question that comes to mind is why this instance occurs on
Instagram instead of posting funny faces to an app like Snapchat, where images are
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Being Real on Fake Instagram
more ephemeral. When I asked Emily this, she told me about a post that was for
specific people, but nonetheless desired a (small) public and that she wanted to
remember:
There are two advantages to having it on your finsta. We had a little Christmas tree in our
room until like two weeks ago [late February], which I think is funny. So, like, I took a photo
with our Christmas tree and then I posted it on my finsta, and [was] like: “Hey guys, we still
haven’t gotten rid of our Christmas tree,” and then maybe I’d be like: “@[Roommate] get rid
of the tree already blah blah blah” and then like, so it’s fun in that respect because it’s a little
more public than a group text, so you can kind of be like: “hey guys, look at this funny
thing,” but also it’s not like: “hey everyone, here’s this funny thing.”
Um, that, and it’s kind of fun—one of my favorite things about finsta is that I can go back and
look at old things that I’ve posted and be like: “that was so funny,” or “I can’t believe I
posted that,” or “I looked terrible in that photo, like, that’s physically impossible.”
This type of interaction is not possible with something like Snapchat, on which
many funny things might circulate, but where messages vanish in seconds and there
is no means for group conversation. Meanwhile, finstas address a public and create an
archive in a way that text messages deny through their form of address.
The examples described demonstrate how media ideologies about Instagram gave
rise to a new genre, finsta, which has its own ideology. Both project different selves to
different audiences, but they exist within the same platform. For my interlocutors, the
media ideology of Instagram has norms and constraints, some of which the platform
structures and some which are constructed by themselves, limiting the capabilities of
a platform that is central to inscribing, maintaining, and enacting social relations. The
foundation of these norms is the like. The various factors that go into the imagemaking and -sharing process can be traced back to the desire to have one’s posts liked
by others. The visual economy of Instagram is entangled in this feature and the
desires, obligations, and anxieties that coalesce around the act of liking. It is through
this feature, and the broader social expectations of self-presentation, that my
interlocutors perceived—and perpetuated—stringent norms on the platform.
These norms and desires encourage users to post a particular version of themselves
—one that is well-liked. But while engaging in this mode of communication, some felt an
unmet desire for a less mediated self, for a self not defined by filters or likes, but by
realness. Here one form of Instagram is cure to the ills of another. The act of sharing
images is central to creating social norms on Instagram, but sharing a different type of
image on finsta opens up new ways of being—new animations, and arguably a new
form of the medium itself, complicating how we delineate between media.
The simultaneous constructing of boundaries and breaking of conventions on
Instagram demonstrates that it can be the site for both highly curated images posted
strategically and ugly selfies that index a supposed authenticity, by the same person.
Here one medium multiplies, hosting different, opposing but related, animations of
the self. Finstas show that recent theorizations of media such as media ideologies and
remediation can be expanded and even inverted. The two forms of Instagram
described here hardly exhaust the ways that users engage with that medium, but
they demonstrate how complicated media fields are in practice. A single platform can
be the site of multiple media ideologies at the same time, depending on what each
user is looking for, what message she wants to send, and to whom.
Notes
Acknowledgments. I thank my interlocutors, including those not featured here, for taking time
to share their experiences with me. This research began under the guidance of Alex Dent and
Josh Bell, and I appreciated their comments and encouragement in early stages. Emma Backe,
Alex Dent, Sarah Wagner, and four reviewers for HAU offered comments on all or part of the
manuscript. I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers (especially Reviewer 2) at
JLA, as well as Sonia Das, for incisive comments that greatly improved the article. Lastly, I
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Journal of Linguistic Anthropology
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should thank the person who accidentally followed me with their finsta, a moment of
miscommunication that proved generative.
1. I quote my interlocutors with minimal editing, retaining audible pauses such as “like” or
“um” in transcripts, both to center the form of their communicative practices (verbal and on
Instagram) and as a nod to their effort to portray “authentic” selves on finsta. I also refer to my
interlocutors using pseudonyms.
2. Following my interlocutors, I use “finsta” to refer to “fake” Instagram accounts. Since
they rarely used “rinsta,” I generally refer to “real” Instagrams as “primary accounts.”
3. Instagram introduced “stories”—posts that went away after 24 hours—in 2016, which
created a new genre within the app which could be used for more spontaneous, frank posts
such as those that appear on finstas. This change occurred after my interviews were conducted
and is not included in analysis. See also footnote 11.
4. Instagram use is dramatically higher among age groups under 30. See Pew Research
Center, “Social Media Update 2016,” November 11, 2016: http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/
11/11/social-media-update-2016/ and NORC at University of Chicago, “New Survey:
Snapchat and Instagram are most popular social media platforms among American teens.”
Science Daily, April 21, 2017: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/04/170421113306.
htm.
5. On the rise of “prosumer capitalism,” see Ritzer and Jurgenson 2010.
6. I italicize the quantifiable like of Instagram as part of its lexicon. This focuses attention on
the unique role of the like, which drives much of social media practice.
7. See also Kopytoff 1986. However, it isn’t just consumption that marks the social lives of
images, but also interaction, which imbues them with value (Graeber 2001:33).
8. Josh Constine, “Instagram is switching its feed from chronological to best posts first.”
TechCrunch. March 15, 2016, https://techcrunch.com/2016/03/15/filteredgram/
9. See Munn 1986 on fame and value.
10. On the end to the chronological newsfeed, compare Casey Johnston, “The Feed Is
Dying,” New York Magazine, April 28, 2016, http://nymag.com/selectall/2016/04/the-feed-isdying.html and Rob Horning, “The Overload,” Marginal Utility, The New Inquiry, April 29,
2016, https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/the-overload/.
11. In 2017, Instagram introduced the option of posting multiple pictures in a single post as
a slideshow. This circumvents the double-post taboo, which has surely changed Instagram use,
but is not reflected in the data analyzed here as interviews were conducted prior to this feature.
12. Heidegger (1962:98) refers to the type of being which equipment possesses as readinessat-hand, and notes that activities like using a hammer—or posting an image to Instagram—are
intimate actions.
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