I understand that Instagram is the place where everyone goes to show off their best pictures and the best version of themselves, but surely I can’t be the only one whose starting to get fed up with it all.
I’ve always loved taking photos and I still do, mainly because I love looking back and seeing what’s changed and re-living those moments. But I don’t need Instagram for that.
When parents took my brother and I on holiday to Florida I took a lot of photos, if you ask my family, they’ll say I took too many yet none of them are posted online. They’re in a folder and every so often I go back to them and take a trip down memory lane. Nowadays if I want to look at old photos, they’re all on my iPhone and there are exactly 28.071 photos and iCloud is already trying to get me to upgrade (again) so that I don’t run out of space. Out of those 28.071 photos I’ve shared 76 on Instagram and the people that follow me probably don’t even give a shit about them, so I ask myself: why do I post them?
As well as enjoying taking photos from a young-teen age, I also used to be a Tumblr fan so I guess that if you mix the two things together you get a young teenage version of Emily who would take photos, use Tumblr, read books and write in diaries so I guess that can give us a pretty good idea of why POMELO exists, but I don’t even enjoy Instagram like I used to love Tumblr. I don’t enjoy any social media apps like I used to when I was younger. I guess back then (lol, like 10 years ago) it was a novelty and also it was way different. People weren’t sharing their perfectly curated breakfasts, their expensive take away coffees, their “messy” yet perfect house and hair, their sweaty yet cute bodies in the gym, their organic expensive fruit and vegetables from the market… We were sharing albums full of selfies, mirror selfies (which were even worse), and real life. The whole fun part of Facebook, Tuenti, Snapchat, Instagram and Twitter was that we were seeing real people live their real lives, sharing their own personal thoughts, having fun… and you were there to see it and feel like you were living it with them. Also, side note: everyone was super cringy online and no one cared - that reality is possible (just saying).
I remember that I used to wake up in my first year of university, in a different city compared to all of my friends, and open Instagram or Snapchat on a Saturday morning and see my friend’s stories from the night before. They didn’t look cute and candid, they looked disgusting! But they were sharing videos of themselves screaming the song’s lyrics with each other, I’d see them dancing together and having fun and I’d feel like I was far away yet so close to them and I’d miss them so badly. I’d feel like I was too far and missing out on some of the best nights ever. I don’t get that feeling anymore, how am I supposed to connect with the photos my friend’s share on Instagram if they’re uploading a picture of a fruit bowl?
Nowadays I feel like its a competition of who can share the least photos and the best photos at the same time to make everyone try to figure out what they’re up to with these mischievous and low key posts.
Nowadays no one’s available, everyone is ONLINE but unavailable. Everyone’s watching but no one’s saying anything. Everyone has their phone in their hand but everyone’s too busy “living”.
It’s bullshit.
I’m the first person to take a photo of everything because my generation has grown up with a smartphone in their hand and we’ve grown up in this online culture, but I’m also the first person to say that it sucks.
I like to upload pictures and I like to be online because I’ve met so many cool people via Instagram who are now my friends and I don’t want to close that door completely but I also hate most of what I see every time I open it. I hate that I have no control over what IG decides is “in” and “the new thing”, I hate that I’m shown reels instead of my friend’s posts, I hate that likes are too powerful, I hate that my feed isn’t chronological. But there I am, living a part of my life in the damn app. I try to be real: I never use filters, I never edit my photos, I never try to show a life that isn’t mine but it always feels like I’m living in a make-believe world anyway. I share my thoughts and my truest self through POMELO and I always try to be me and not think about what anyone else is saying or doing, but then I come across people I know’s profiles and I see what they’re posting and I can’t shake that they’re sharing such lies and nothing even close to reality. Then, I go into this downward spiral where I’m aware that the influencers are doing precisely this and then it’s just a snowball rolling down a hill getting bigger and bigger and I ask myself what the fuck I’m doing this for.
^Update from Emily from the future: I was speaking to my tita on the phone today and she shared this idea with me that blew my mind and I also feel that it fits into this post perfectly. She and my uncle are currently abroad travelling and she noticed that when us humans take photos of things (even if they’re for us to look at and never upload anywhere) what we’re doing is only choosing the things we want to save/show. I’ll explain: if I travel to Hong Kong and take photos in the city’s streets, when I look back on those photos I’m not going to have a pure, entirely realistic, whole image of the city. I’m only going to have the things that I decided were pretty, ugly, shocking, funny… What about everything else? Does it seize to exist?
The way I’m applying this new found idea to this social media-photo sharing post is that we’re constantly taking photos and most of the time we don’t even know why. Second of all, we’re taking photos with a filter on our own eyes and mind and when we look back on these photos or when other people online see these photos, we’re telling a misleading story. How many times have you gone to a restaurant, café, festival, party, shop… because it looked amazing online? And how many times did it look like it did in those photos? Exactly…
Maybe some people’s lives are as amazing as they’re showing online and they’re being completely faithful to their own reality, but I feel like that’s not the majority and no matter how hard we try to show our real lives online, we’re never sharing all of it and we’re always telling a different story than the one that’s unravelling in front of us in real life.
Do I even want to know what Tuenti is? Sounds horrid.
¡Tu tía tiene mucha razón! Al final hacer una foto es escoger una parte de la realidad a través de una angulación determinada, unas luces, colores, etc... Súmale que la mayoría están planeadas y que al final, como tú dices, solo recordaremos a través de ellas momentos que no fueron tal cual los veremos en el futuro 🤯
Por cierto, por aquí otra que allá por 2013 tenía su tumblr lleno 😇🧡