Under the Influence- How to Fake Your Way Into Getting Rich on Instagram

by Trey Ratcliff

  Here’s our old friend @travel_inhershoes again, the doyenne of travel influencers. She’s dropping a plug for @delta. Did she take off her top before getting under that blanket? If so, well done Delta! That would actually make me interested in flying your listless airline again. Note she says in her description for this post, “I have no idea how I became a travel influencer,” and then subsequently sells a “How to Become A Travel Influencer” online course and makes about $200,000.

  Here is @pilotmadeleine (1.1 million followers) just having a light breakfast in a luxury resort hotel with a cave in Mykonos. Is she really gonna eat all that food? Anyway, as far as that @pilotmadeleine goes I could have chosen any of the photos in her stream, as they all portray an uber-perfect life. She also has a suspicious historical follower count that is worthy of your investigation, in addition to what appear to be automated comments and likes.

  Oh, give us a break @miss.everywhere. I swear, some of you Influencers can really pack away the calories. On a more serious note, I think this is a good example of how Influencers create a false narrative of a perfect life (sometimes in a fraudulent manner) and it basically makes other people feel bad about their lives.

  I could share thousands of photos of this ilk from countless people on Instagram, but I have a feeling you’re already seeing them in your stream. There’s a wide gap between an ego-fueled perfect-life selfie and a fun, light quick selfie for storytelling.

  But now let’s take a less cynical turn and look at some fun selfies.

  Selfie-Deprecating

  These are the sorts of silly selfies that are ironic and actually pretty funny. I quite like these sorts because they poke fun at the entire institution of selfies.

  Now, this is the kind of selfie I think is great: where dads actively troll their daughters by recreating their daughters’ ridiculous selfie posts. Once he got into it, he surpassed his daughter in followers. Source: reddit

  This one is called The Mount Rushmore of Selfies. It’s another fun example of a selfie that I quite like. They’re not really making fun of the artform itself, but no one is taking it too seriously either. Source: reddit

  Hey, Tyrion Lannister can do whatever he wants, and I will love it. Source: reddit

  Clever idea for this lady to make it look like the elephant was taking the selfie. Source: reddit

  Selfies in “Selfie Zones”

  Many people have begun to take the selfie craze to the next level. To the casual observer, many of these people are exhibiting insane human behavior.

  Here’s a selfie party for you in an Instagram-famous selfie spot in Singapore.

  For example, there is a beautiful infinity pool in Singapore atop a hotel. Every day, there are dozens of women there on the edge of the pool, taking countless selfies each until they look as fabulous as possible. They get bonus points if they can manage it while holding some bubbly and perhaps you can see the brand of their sunglasses.

  Related to this scene above with all the selfies in the pool, the Ayana Resort and Spa in Bali recently banned any photos in their “Instagram-famous River Pool”. They couched it in a new campaign they are calling “In the Moment,” which is a pretty good spin.

  Here is a photo from the Ayuna Resort in Bali from @pilotmadeleine, where Instagrammers are no longer allowed to take photos. Note the high-quality bot responses to get that comment count way up.

  Besides these sorts of travel hotspots, there is a growing number of pop-up businesses and “museums” that are set up specifically for taking selfies.

  For example, one such interactive “museum” in New York is named the Rosé Mansion. Instagrammers pay to enter, and the museum has a variety of Instagram-ready photo opportunities. Visitors can lay in bathtubs filled with faux rose petals or embed themselves in a ball pit whilst sucking down a glass of rosé.

  Places like this are popping up all over the country. Amanda Hess writes about a few of these museums in “The Existential Void of the Pop-Up ‘Experience’” an article for the New York Times:70

  [The museums I visited] included Color Factory, stocked with “participatory installations of colors”; Candytopia, an “outrageously interactive candy wonderland”; 29Rooms, a “groundbreaking art experience” dedicated to “expanding your reality”; and the Museum of Ice Cream’s spinoff space, featuring a “Pint Shop” and “tasting room” created in collaboration with Target that “re-envisions the grocery store, enabling a hyper-sensory experience.”

  Hess goes on to say there is even a place you can take your dogs, to get some of the best photos of your pet. It’s called “Human’s Best Friend,” and they feature many photo-worthy locations.

  One of the many places you can position your Instagram-perfect pet at Human’s Best Friend.

  Hess visited many of these places and was amazed at the level of hollowness and narcissism. She ends her article with the comment, “I felt like a shell of a person. It was as if I was witnessing the total erosion of meaning itself.”

  Friendsies and Groupsies

  Technically, a selfie’s not a selfie if it’s taken by someone else, but since friendsies and groupsies are taken with selfie-like intent, I’ve included them here.

  Friendsies are when two or more Instagrammers spend a lot of time taking photos of one another in different poses. This approach allows the pair to get more camera angles, which allows for more angles of the outfit and more context for the photo.

  Here’s what I mean. When multiple ladies (note: I’ve mostly seen ladies doing this) are in friendsies mode, one lady takes many, many, many photos of the other lady, who cycles through her rotation of poses. The model knows to maximize the number of options she’ll have. Then, the two swap phones and rinse and repeat for the other friend. If there’s more than two, they cycle through all the rotations. Then, the girls stare silently down at their phones for the next ten minutes, while selecting the best photo to share with the world on social media.

  Of course, not all friendsies are ill-conceived. Some friend groups are just indulging in pure fun and not trying to feed a social media ego at all. But, let’s be honest, most are just feeding the ego monster that’s whispering, “If everyone thinks I am beautiful, cool, or wealthy, then that is better for me.” This is a very clear sign of insanity. I’m not saying regular friendsie-takers are totally insane, but I am saying they are somewhat mad.

  There is a popular account on Instagram, called @boyfriends_of_insta, that provides a funny, behind-the-scenes look at what really goes into producing these “candid” friendsies.

  Now, after posting the perfect photo, a lot of rando Instagram users will immediately jump in the comments and tell the poster how beautiful they are. The poster gets rewarded straight away (cue: rush of dopamine) and is encouraged to do it all again for a non-stop cycle of rewards. Also, the poster will feel somewhat obligated to go to that commenter’s profile, find a photo, and say that the other person looks “so beautiful” in it, too. It’s like a cabal of insane people encouraging this clearly insane cycle of behavior.

  A new twist on the friendsies are the groupsies. This is an interesting phenomenon, super popular amongst South Koreans, that mostly happens when groups of friends travel together. Instead of taking photos of each other, they hire a photographer to follow them around on their fabulous vacation, taking photos of their group everywhere they go to share with their friends stuck at home. Now, I do not think this is a “bad” or “terrible” thing, but it is something new. Below is a photo I recently took in Thailand.

  Here’s a group of five Korean women having a heck of a good time. This photographer follows them around all day to take photos of them and pose them in all sorts of ways. Again, I don’t think there is anything inherently wrong with this kind of behavior, other than it is something that is now very popular because of social media sharing. Source: @treyratcliff

  Let’s look at one more example of how mass connectivity converts a peccadillo into a preposterous and poisonous
problem.

  I’ve noticed something peculiar about women friends in the real world. It isn’t always the case, but it often is. Women friends, or even acquaintances, when they get together in person, often begin the interchange by telling the other woman how pretty she looks. They comment on each other’s dress or shoes or something to this effect. It’s a quirky thing women learn to do that acts as a social lubricant. That’s fine.

  Let’s expand this woman group to a social occasion, let’s say a Book Club meeting. Now there’s five of them meeting at a Starbucks. The first few minutes will be this serpentine Elizabethan-parlor etiquette where they must give a cumulative 5-factorial set of outward compliments to complete every combination and permutation. It’s great because each individual woman will receive at least four compliments on her outward appearance that acknowledges the time and effort she put into preparing for this royal televised meeting.

  Again, this is not a bad thing at all. It’s just friendly women saying friendly things to their friends. They’re friends! That’s all fine in my book.

  However, let’s multiply that book club by 1,000. And that’s what Instagram has done. Now, women are getting 1,000 times the dopamine boost of other women telling them they are pretty. The strange thing is, most of those women are not their friends, they will never meet them, and they will have no material impact on their life. In fact, they are the opposite of friends, because they are strangers. And, as they receive compliments about their outward appearance, the posters are obliged to give a compliment back to that stranger to continue this superficial cycle.

  So, the network effect of Instagram has taken this one quirky behavior of women that works in real life and makes sense on a small level and created a multiplier that over-reinforces the importance of outward appearance.

  Lookism

  It is important to note that women are, on average, more concerned with their looks than men because it is one of the primary determinants of sexual selection. It was once thought that men cared less about their appearance because of a higher self-esteem, but recent studies show that is not true. It is an unfortunate fact that women are more likely to be judged by their appearance than men are. And because Instagram is a visual machine, women are more likely to use it as a vehicle to display their appearance.

  In an article in Psychology Today entitled “Why Women Feel Bad About Their Appearance,” Nigel Barber, Ph.D., said:

  The truth is that women’s insecurity about their appearance is driven by competition with other women. We see this quite clearly in connection with the slender standard of attractiveness where women wish to be more slender than men find attractive. The reason, of course, is that they want to beat their competitors – other women.71

  I believe that social media has made it very difficult for some women to maintain an inner serenity because their appearance is constantly on display. Normally, it’s only on display when they go out of their homes for whatever reason. Now, everyone sees them and judges them all the time. This is a new phenomenon in human interaction, as never before have non-Hollywood women been on display 24/7.

  Case Study: Sexy Selfies and Danielle Cohn

  Let’s look at an interesting example that shows how certain kinds of selfies can create an entire persona in an otherwise innocent young woman. It’s also an open invitation to get trolled, unfortunately, as well.

  Here is Danielle Cohn, age 14. I’m not sure what’s happening under the water, but I can hear the Jaws theme song in my head.

  In a Netflix episode of Follow This, Buzzfeed journalist Scaachi Koul talked to 14-year-old social media megastar, Danielle Cohn, who has 10 million followers on TikTok (formerly called Music.ly) and over 2 million on Instagram (@daniellecohn). Danielle is known for dancing, singing, being cute and spunky, and wearing sexy outfits72 (quite inappropriately for someone who is only 14, in my opinion).

  Many of the comments she gets are overwhelmingly negative and toxic.

  She shares rather suggestive photos and videos here on Instagram and other social media. Notice the hashtag for #playboy so that people following that hashtag might discover her as well.

  Danielle gets tons of comments on the dances and photos she posts every day. Many are negative. On the show, Danielle, reads a few of the negative ones out loud, like, “Being fat. Being a slut.” She then shows some cartoonish images of her body that her audience post back to her.

  “This is deeply disturbing and wildly unfunny,” Koul says to her, in the show. Koul goes on to ask, “Those comments don’t bother you, because you seem so impressed about your appearance?” Danielle responds in a circular manner, “Not really, I just like to look good because I want to look good.”

  Danielle’s mom jumps in and argues, “I know they bother you because there are days you don’t even eat, because you don’t want people to say you are bloated.” Danielle responds, while slowly pinching in the natural amount of fat under her jaw and giving the hint of a duckface, “Well, yeah, but that’s like every teenage girl.”

  Koul replies, “I don’t know if it is.”

  The entire episode, entitled “Girl Boss,” is fascinating and illustrates how the harmful effects of social media are getting into the minds of not only young teenagers but girls even younger.

  The meme spreads from girl to girl to girl. Many of her fans are taking similar photos to share with others. Young girls see how successful and popular these sexy kinds of posts can be, so naturally, they emulate it to build their own self-confidence in an endless spiral of hollow pursuits.

  It’s a little obvious, but we can’t leave here without at least touching upon narcissism as well. There was a recent study, co-authored by Aziz Muqaddam and Seunga Venus Jin, that illustrated how there is a bit of an inter-narcissist feeding-frenzy going on that’s being fueled by social media. The study, entitled, Narcissism 2.0! Would Narcissists Follow Fellow Narcissists on Instagram? found that narcissists have a more favorable attitude towards selfies posted by other narcissists. These individuals also showed a higher tendency to follow other narcissists.73

  Connection Between Social Media and Anxiety

  Another recent study, No More FOMO: Limiting Social Media Decreases Loneliness and Depression, by Melissa G. Hunt, Rachel Marx, Courtney Lipson, and Jordyn Young confirmed that the less time people spend on social media, the less anxiety they have.74 Now, to me, this is obvious, but it is good to have actual scientific studies to back up our own intuition and observations. Below is a synopsis of their study:

  Given the breadth of correlational research linking social media use to worse well-being, we undertook an experimental study to investigate the potential causal role that social media plays in this relationship.

  Method: After a week of baseline monitoring, 143 undergraduates at the University of Pennsylvania were randomly assigned to either limit Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat use to 10 minutes, per platform, per day, or to use social media as usual for three weeks.

  Results: The limited-use group showed significant reductions in loneliness and depression over three weeks compared to the control group. Both groups showed significant decreases in anxiety and fear of missing out over baseline, suggesting a benefit of increased self-monitoring.75

  One of the students in the study summed it up by saying, “Not comparing my life to the lives of others had a much stronger impact than I expected, and I felt a lot more positive about myself during those weeks.”

  This anxiety has been engineered by the algorithms that are in a race to capture our attention. Former Google project manager, Tristan Harris, has posited the idea that these algorithms are hijacking our minds in a negative way. On CNBC, reporter Christina Farr said, “Harris was among the first to make the connection between neuroscience and social media, and question whether it’s even possible for many people to use social media constructively.”

  She dug further into how social media creates anxiety and reported:

  For the latest thinkin
g from academics on the subject, I turned to John Torous, director of the digital psychiatry division at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Torous said he doesn’t rule out the possibility that social media is making people more depressed and anxious, but he pointed out that the research is still early.

  Anxiety Is Not Just Tied to Selfies

  Instagrammers suffer more feelings of anxiety when looking at photos of others. This seems to be consistent across all categories regardless of the subject matter. I’ve chosen one example: destination wedding photography.

  Well-known wedding photographer Jim Pollard (@jimpollardgoesclick), who routinely takes a helicopter to stunning locations throughout New Zealand to shoot his bridal couples, talked to me openly about social media-induced anxiety. He said that the wedding photographer community is absolutely full of angst when they see beautiful photos taken by other photographers.

  “Let me tell you, it’s an absolute cesspool of drama and anxiety,” Pollard told me over email, who often speaks at wedding photography conferences to try and get people to calm down a little bit when it comes to social media. Even he gets caught up in it sometimes though, and admits that despite his success, he still feels tremendous anxiety when he sees a good photo from a competitor.