HOW CASUAL ‘CASUAL INSTAGRAM’ ACTUALLY IS?
DENIZ AKKAYA
Is ‘casual Instagram’ even greater performance than ‘glam Instagram’? We investigate…
Yes, the time of the beauty YouTubers came to an end when the pandemic arrived and moved all of us, collectively, to simplistic lifestyles affecting what we wear, what we put on our face & body, and many more things. With that, being ‘casual’ became the it-thing that everyone is trying to achieve. Creators of TikTok showed the entire world that the viewers now want authenticity and reality rather than filtered, glammed-up content that is far away from the reality we all experience in our day-to-day lives. Making the app an enormous success, TikTok’s casualness has also seeped into Instagram and thus photo dumps were born!
As a problem arising from the fact that everything that becomes popular becomes something performative and loses its authenticity, we ask: how casual ‘casual Instagram’ actually is? When you take a step back, you actually realize ‘casual’ Instagram takes a whole lot of more effort and work than ‘performative’ Instagram. And by performative, I mean extremely posed, full makeup, dress, background, the whole thing…
To make an analogy, you can think of reality TV and scripted TV. Reality TV is obviously not real but it attempts to convince the viewers that what they’re watching is actually real life. But it’s not. That’s what photo dumps and casual Instagram are. It’s like reality TV or we can call it Instagram’s hyper-reality. Because the creator of the post is trying to convince you as the viewer that this is “just a casual moment” or that they are “not trying too hard”. But in fact, they ARE trying hard. In photo dumps, you still pick the cutest photos and most importantly, curate a narrative device about your life through these photos. They may not be super edited or maybe they’re not posed or glam enough but they’re strategically selected and put together to convey a specific message. If this is not “trying too hard” then what is?
To explain with an example, when you enter Kylie Jenner’s Instagram page, we see a very performative feed and we realize that it does not reflect the whole reality. Kylie is our scripted TV. If you go to Emma Chamberlain’s page, you’ll see more ‘casual’ posts, photo dumps, blurred not posed photos. And Emma is our reality TV. As real, or authentic as these posts may seem, there’s still so much effort that goes into curating these to make YOU perceive them as effortless, authentic, and most importantly, casual.
If they’re both putting so much effort, why do we start to despise the one who does it outright while we see the pretender as “cool”?
We have to remind ourselves that none of it is real. Shakespeare calls this “The Suspension of Disbelief”. When we go to a play or when watching a movie, we suspend our disbelief for an hour or however long these things may take because we want to emotionally invest in characters and want to be entertained. Stories are the places we escape to when things get hard and Instagram is the same. When we log onto Instagram, we all kind of just suspend our disbelief for a little bit and we believe everything that we see. We think appearances equal reality but they one thousand percent don’t.
So, stop worrying about the latest Instagram trend, this trend or that trend. Just do whatever you want to do because life is too short to try to be ‘casual’ when you just can BE casual.
