Commentary: The awkwardness of using Instagram as a 50-something
SINGAPORE: The dead French philosopher Charles Montesquieu wrote: "If we only wanted to be happy, it would be piece of cake. But we want to exist happier than other people, and that is almost always difficult, since we recall them happier than they are."
That was 250 years ago. Supplant happy with glamorous/popular/thin/successful and y'all have Instagram.
Curating and presenting an idealised life in Instagram has long challenged young digital natives.
Increasingly, now, it is also challenging older people who are migrating there from Facebook considering they worry near their data falling into the wrong hands but who still want social media.
One in four people on Instagram are over fifty.
PARTIES, PICTURES AND FILTERS
The photograph- and video-sharing app allows people to post highlights of their lives — the most picturesque food, the about breath-taking views, the liveliest parties, the prettiest make-up, all enhanced by photo-filters.
Instagram was launched in 2010 as a photo-sharing service and was bought by Facebook in 2012. At the last count in 2017, it had 800 meg monthly active users.
Selena Gomez is the most followed person with 135 one thousand thousand fans, but Beyoncé gets more likes. The most-followed pet is a Pomeranian called JiffPom, with over viii million fans.
A 2022 study past Hu Yuheng at the University of Illinois at Chicago and other colleagues found that selfies and photos of friends accounted for most half the pictures. And so came activities, gadgets, nutrient and memes, with manner and pets final.
Those are the facts. But the event with Instagram has always been this: When we're presented with a stream of Instagrammed perfection, how does that make u.s. feel most our own lives?
Following Montesquieu, Instagram makes it hard for us to be happy because everyone else seems to be having a better time than we are.
Non Merely AWKWARD BUT HARMFUL
This is not about an older person criticising things that young people like considering they themselves don't understand it.
My parents worried almost computer games and "video nasties" (horror movies), while smoking in the same room equally me and indulging me with sugary, saturated-fat-filled treats, and so I don't imagine that older people can necessarily tell younger people what'southward bad for them.
But it is most how the awkwardness that older people experience when they launch themselves on social media is based on the knowledge that with the dopamine loftier of being liked comes the inevitable low when that doesn't happen.
There's always a hangover — something that older people accept more experience with than the young.
Similarly, older Instagrammers can see that as before long as you accept followers, there is pressure to practise something that makes you lot worth post-obit.
If offline social rules use in Instagram, it would be comparable to going out with friends. If y'all're there, your job is to exist interesting. If you're non prepared to exercise that, then stay at habitation.
Terminal twelvemonth, the UK's Purple Gild for Public Wellness surveyed one,500 fourteen to 24-yr-olds. Their report placed Instagram at the peak of the social media ranking for being harmful to the mental wellbeing of young people.
Shirley Cramer, its CEO, warned that Instagram was "very paradigm-focused and … may exist driving feelings of inadequacy and feet in young people".
These young people are the digital natives who employ it regularly. What more for digital immigrants who don't know who Selena Gomez is?
It may be that at that place is no correct style to exist on Instagram for the over-50s in the eyes of the under-20s. If my students share photos of a wild political party, that's nifty; if I practice, that'south slightly uncomfortable.
SHARING AND PRIVACY
Nevertheless, I joined Instagram last calendar week, aged 52. By mistake.
My handphone shares a subscription package with my teenage son'south (similar Harry Potter's and Voldemort'southward wands had the same phoenix feather at their core) and then when he downloaded Instagram, it appeared on my screen.
I clicked to run into what information technology was, and evidently that signed me upwardly.
Within five minutes I had thirteen followers. A week later I have 36. I have never heard of 19 of them.
I posted a mildly humorous moving-picture show of a chair that looked as if it was grinning. It was liked by someone called I-australiana. Who is she? How did she know virtually my smile chair? Older people used to really knowing who their friends are will find this a chip disconcerting.
So it went on. Instagram invited me to follow my Facebook friends. When I clicked, I got an anxiety-inducing "Are you sure you really want to practise this?" popular-upwardly.
If information technology was prophylactic, why would they enquire me that? Older people hesitate before signing considering we have heard things similar: "The value of your investments tin get up equally well equally downward."
Older people are also more aware of negotiating the line betwixt privacy and sharing. Recent news about Cambridge Analytica has made it clear what we postal service on social media can find its way into places we didn't foresee, and be put to uses nosotros wouldn't approve of, such as targeting imitation news stories at voters to sway elections.
It's one matter to craft your life on social media; the next step is to craft your life off social media in order to look good online.
Wait at food. Some of my research is into food as a social construct - we eat what nosotros are told is adept - which is why dissimilar cultures accept different ideas almost eating, cows, pigs, dogs and horses. The new social construction of food, however, isn't how it tastes; it's how it looks.
A report by Chris Holmberg and colleagues in 2022 found that teens postal service pictures of food that is mostly high in calories and depression in nutrition. Looks proficient, tastes good — but it isn't. On Instagram, it'south more important for food to exist visually appealing than to taste expert.
Instagram and other social media open up new avenues of connection — once nosotros have overcome the feet of getting it wrong — which is exciting.
Merely if it changes our diets and then that what matters isn't the gustatory modality, it'southward whether information technology's an Instagrammable confection of rainbow nutrient and unicorn sprinkles, that is something all generations can be anxious nigh.
Andrew Duffy is an banana professor at the Wee Kim Wee School of Advice and Information. His interests are in journalism and social media.
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Source: https://cnalifestyle.channelnewsasia.com/commentary/commentary-awkwardness-using-instagram-50-something-215371
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