Instagram and the paradox of illusory truth
Instagram serves as a modern diary, revealing curated identities that blend authenticity with performance, exposing deeper truths behind self-presentation
There’s a lot of dissing the ‘Gram’ (Instagram) these days. Let me, therefore, be contrarian and begin with a scandalous proposition: To truly know a person today, you must study their Instagram. The real diary of the 21st century is the curated feed. The very superficial nature of Instagram makes it the truest revelation of the subject. What we choose to display is not what we are, but what we want others to believe we are. And therein lies the deep secret of our desire.
To paraphrase Karl Marx (or perhaps Jacques Lacan, or maybe both because it doesn’t matter here), ideology reveals itself in its very concealment. Can we then posit the following: Instagram, or another similar platform, is not the opposite of authenticity; it’s authenticity on steroids. And Freud would chime in thus: it is where the Id posts selfies.
There’s too much Marx and Lacan going on in this author’s mind these days, owing to some academic compulsions, stymying her ‘fun’ takes. But, using them extensively in her essays, maybe she wants to convince others that she loves theory more than sarcasm. (She doesn’t. But the charade of erudition must continue as bills need to be paid.) Curating an authorial voice.
Full disclosure: A conversation with a dear friend about my Instagram feed has triggered this essay. “I know all about your struggles, but your feed is all about a fabulous life.” It’s funny as well as revealing because another friend recently shared something opposite. That they got to know of the health situation of my family — that includes three troublesome canine members — and my sudden, unhealthy weight and hair loss through social media, and figured out I was struggling and wanted to know if there was anything they could do to help.
Two people picked two different clues from the same feed that I don’t even care to caption elaborately anymore. So, yay, maybe I’m not curating it well! It’s got bright, shiny travel pictures as well as the improperly lit photos betraying the grimy corners of my house that I’ve learnt to ignore. I’m not having them cleaned even for Diwali because it’s too much hassle.
On social media visual feeds, what is repressed gets revealed in the very act of repression. A kind of Streisand Effect. For example, the person who carefully constructs a persona of effortless natural beauty has, in fact, admitted, through this very construction, that a certain kind of beauty is effortful and performative. The photo grid becomes a psychoanalytic Rorschach test. The viewer can piece together a picture through the inkblots of filters.
What is fascinating is that most people believe they can control this process. “I curate my feed carefully.” But in curation lies exposure. The gap between the post and the life becomes the space of truth. What does this mean? That even rebellion becomes style. The person who posts their acne proudly in the era of hundred-step skincare regimens has not escaped capitalism. They have simply found a new niche market for it. We should not underestimate the economy of this exposure.
Instagram is not merely a socio-cultural and psychological space but a marketplace of selves. Theodor Adorno would have recognised it as the perfect commodity culture. The self-conscious branding of individuals by themselves as products. Curated fragments of life as consumable aesthetics. Even the so-called “anti-influencer,” who posts unfiltered selfies and messy bedrooms or writes long my-life-is-not-perfect captions, is merely participating in a different aesthetic regime: the commodification of authenticity.
Michel Foucault spoke of “technologies of the self,” the techniques employed by individuals to fashion their subjectivity. We do not have secret selves anymore. We have aesthetic selves. But the aesthetics, like all art, betray the artist. We choose only those authentic versions that suit our aesthetic narratives. Our non-urbane and unfashionable parents, for example, may have no space on our digital mantelpiece. Our pre-makeover looks from decades ago must be carefully hidden unless they fit our present aesthetic. Garish bed sheets from our hometown houses can’t be allowed to slip out; that status is reserved only for our grandmother’s hand embroidered sarees, real or mythical.
A friend once shared how she figures out people’s marital health through the tone of their social media visuals. Over-the-top captions on togetherness under cutesy photos or the slow, steady disappearance of the spouse both signal trouble in paradise. It may or may not be true, but it establishes one general rule for today: visuals on social media are not a mask. Maybe the wearer doesn’t know it yet.
Instagram, for example, doesn’t really deceive us. It only allows us to deceive ourselves knowingly. We produce and consume lies. We are too lazy or unbothered to call out the lies we consume, and as producers, we take other consumers’ lethargy of calling the lies out for granted. To “trust” someone’s Instagram, therefore, does not mean to take it at face value. Maybe just read it symptomatically and trust the lie to tell the truth.
Just like Goddess Lakshmi’s Maya avatar, the paradoxically illusory Truth.
Nishtha Gautam is an academic and author. The views expressed are personal
