Instagram is a photo feed of what we want others to see. However, starting university can be made even harder by the ‘false’ realities that Instagram creates.
When beginning university there is a pressure to make friends on your course and with your new flat mates, which Instagram exacerbates. I remember seeing friends from home posting photos with people at their university, and blindly assuming they’d already made a tonne of friends. And I hadn’t.
Those with larger followings have taken on the social responsibility to dismantle these ‘false realities’, that they may create with their own Instagram posts. They do this by posting what they look like on an ordinary day, not posing, or demonstrating before and afters of their edited photos. These little steps help to promote the falseness of Instagram whilst still allowing them to share their highlights with others.
The emergence of ‘finstas’, (where people post their unfiltered, more realistic images of themselves) may be a result of the pressure to present an idealised view of yourself. This is where university comes in. Posting the highlights of your university experience is definitely something most people are guilty of, yet this isn’t fundamentally wrong. The mind-set that Instagram can lead us to fall into is where the issue is created. A photo of two girls on Instagram isn’t a validation of friendship, it’s just a photo. Believing everything we see and everything we read on social media is something most of us can easily slip into the habit of. In this post-truth era, with ‘fake news’ and unrealistic social media accounts, we cannot readily assume that anything presented to us is real.
Instagram was a contributing factor to my initial discontent at university, feeling like I was missing out and that my uni experience was not as fun or social as others. Except the odd tweet or two, I have never read anything of length about how Instagram may change your view of your own university experience. Especially to those who are considering university, and see this representation on social media, you may (I especially did) not consider the downfalls of university as much: the deadlines, homesickness, pressure to go out and drink etc. It is not university student’s responsibility to represent ‘the true uni life’, that is not what I’m saying. But even if university is the best 3 years of your life, everyone experiences these issues, and how much a person does experience these issues does not in any shape or form correlate to their Instagram page.
Everyone’s university experience is different, and everyone’s has pros and cons. You can do university whichever way you like, whether that is going out all the time, commuting or focusing on your studying- it is up to you. There is no definite way to do it like Instagram may suggest.