Instagram Models

  Hello internet friends! Today I wanted to examine one trend I believe Cairncross never saw coming was the rise of the actual trendsetter. You know who I’m talking about, the Instagram “models” we have all come to worship. The ones who have 300k followers are aren’t really sure why but for some reason that absurd number of followers makes them some sort of celebrity to us. We devour every word they say in their lengthy captions, we obsessed over finding out where they got that shirt, we spend hundreds of dollars ordering that Fit Tea they promote.

     Where did this internet celebrity come from? How did these Trendsetters become so influential in our society? I believe Cairncross missed this point because perhaps she never realized just how influenced we would be by the internet. Perhaps she never thought that we would get to a point that celebrities are no longer movie starts but YouTube stars. In the Social Media Landscape: Performing Citizenship Online it is said that: early studies of the internet often conceptualized a ‘virtual world’ as separate from a ‘real life’.

   I believe this rise of the Instagram celebrity is due to the fact that to many the internet is no longer just that virtual world, it is reality. How could it not be? People spend their entire days staring at their brightly lit up screens. Eventually the people within those screens have become what is real, they are to me at least the perfect manifestation of what everyone wants to be. With their perfectly white teeth and waist trainers these Instagram models project to women (and men) across the globe the image of this perfect being. And since the internet is such a large part of our lives now we see these people as being reality, they are real to us. We worship them, aspire to be them. What we forget is the hours of Photoshop and tweaking that goes into each and every picture and video they post. These girls are not rolling out of bed looking like this- even if their caption is “Woke up like this”.

    I think Cairncross missed the rise of the Instagram models as trendsetter because she saw the internet as a virtual reality. She didn’t see that one day it would become such a huge party of people’s lives that the internet is now the reality people live in. Is it the best reality? Probably not. Should you but every waist trainer and Fit Tea that pops up on your timeline? Of course not. Yes, these women are trendsetters but we must not forget that they are not our reality. People don’t go walking around looking the way they do in Instagram photos all day. Stay real ladies.

Work Cited:

Haynes, N. (2016). The social media landscape: Performing citizenship online. In Social Media in Northern Chile (pp. 39-62). London: UCL Press. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1g69xv2.6