I am in love with social media. The idea that I get to interact with all my friends and even meet new people on social media apps is something I became desperate for in high school I must admit. Even now through my college years, I find myself lingering for hours through posts from people I know, and even people I randomly stumble upon from a rabbit hole of clicking on peoples names and their profiles. All this to say, people have ultimately followed a "trend" in the acceptance of what is considered a worthy post.
Who sets these trends? Do these trends fluctuate across apps?
My love for social media and the countless hours I waste on this app is enough to make me believe I have what it takes to break it down for you, the reader that I know has multiple social media accounts, and tell you about my perspective on what trends look like for these applications. Beyond this however, taking a class at Texas Lutheran University on Social Media & Society with Professor Steven Vrooman helps out a lot as well.
Let's break this down a little.
Lee Humphrey's writes a book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and The Accounting of Everyday Life. This book goes into depth about multiple ideas on the effects social media has on our lives. Humphrey's expresses some quality points within some chapters that tie in to how I question where trends come from.
Chapter 3 of Humphrey's book, Performing Identity Work, is a great piece of context to take into consideration. This chapter focuses on identities people take on from real life and through social media, and if they line up to be unison or two completely different 'people'. Humphrey's exemplifies this through her personal life and the different roles she takes on, but which identity is prioritized? The same goes for our lives with social media. I can use myself as an example.
This is 7th grade me. If it wasn't for the fact that I forgot my password, this instagram account would have been deleted because it is nothing but CRINGE for me. You would think it is cringe true, but do you know why? I will go on to explain this soon, because the focus of this picture is on me bio. You see that I literally lay it all out there. Name, religion, sport, grade, school, and even relationship status!! It is hard to see how I am not an open book identity from seeing this. The posts I created on this account only go to show more on how I add to being more of an open book. My life at this time was true to my identity I presented on social media. You saw me for who I really was, and let everything out there, even when I had bad days and talked about crushes, EVEN THOUGH MY PARENTS FOLLOWED THIS ACCOUNT HAHA. I take on Humphrey's identity work from chapter 3 by being true to who I am... in middle school at least.
Anddddd this is me now. This could very much still be cringe and I haven't seen it yet, but I will say it is A LOT cleaner than middle school me. Sure, it comes with growth and growing up and finding me blah blah blah. However, I believe we all see these changes because a part of our phases come from trends we see on social media. Making a clear cut bio for instagram is from seeing all my peers, and even people older than me make their instagrams this way. I felt influenced enough to follow those trends. It makes me question, who first started the trend???
Visualizing this type of trend is pretty vague I know, and I realize it is going to take more content to help you see what it is I am talking about.. so bare with me.
Humphrey's 4th chapter, Remembrance, makes the connection to how we use social media to establish posts that help keep up with our present selves that can be become past reflections as we look back to them from the future (Humphrey's, 2018). Basically, think of these posts as a big online scrapbook. What makes these posts significant enough to scrapbook for people to see? The trend in play does.
This is a post from my 7th grade instagram, which in context of Humphrey's, is my scrapbooking as a kid. I perceived this as an event worthy enough to share to the world! 4 likes worth sounds about right for something I took about 10 minutes to make with a collage app that was the big trend in its time. Looking back to this post however, I can remember how excited I was to go to my first Texas football game ever. Making this post as a 12 year old kid made me feel so cool and a huge talking point with all the cool guys. Using the trendy collage setup made me believe in that moment (present) that it was a worthy post. Looking at it now (future) however makes me realize how idiotic it was to wear my pee-wee football jersey with khaki shorts to a football game and believe it was a way to get recruited to Texas (past)
7th grade me (past) wasn't envisioning this kind of growth 9 years later. from 4 to roughly 400 likes seems like a big jump right??? Trends matter. From the first look you see I went away from collages and posted multiple photos with an actual photographer who has a real camera. I posted this to keep a scrapbook memory of my 22nd mark so future me can see how young and cool I was I hope. However, the main idea is I flowed with the trend, and where the heck did that trend come from?? Obviously it worked and maybe I got a little boost from the fact that it is my birthday which kind of forces people to like and comment, but the trend of scrapbooking style got me here. It may be cringe that I am looking at nothing and holding my jacket out like there is a wind when I come back to this post in the future, but it is a risk I was willing to take lol.
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