Life according to Likes
How influencer culture took over social media and the casual posting trend challenging it
The Birth of Instagram
The early 2010’s birthed many a pop culture phenomenon. Every item of clothing came in Aztec print, every accessory adorned in moustache iconography, all set to the booming EDM hits that defined the first half of the decade. No craze, however, has been as enduring or as influential as the first major social app of the 2010s; Instagram.
Launched in 2010 to immediate popularity (the app received over 1 million downloads in a day when it launched on Android), Instagram provided an alternative to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter – it didn’t matter what you said, it only mattered what you showed. The photo sharing app has grown in its first decade to currently boast over 1 billion users in 32 languages and has shaped an entire generation.
In its humble beginnings, Instagram was distinguishable not for its perfectly curated content but for its 1:1 square ratio and gaudy filters – photos were meant to look doctored, in social medias first widespread taste of photo editing.
While users were still sharing content they thought their ‘followers’ would like, it was mostly a unit of people they knew quite well, and content users wanted to share with these friends, all while playing with Instagrams fun filtering options.
“When I first got Instagram, it was just because I liked photography and thought the filters were cool” says 41-year-old social media manager Carolaine Southall. “I followed a few of my friends on it but it was mostly just to take photos and use the filters.”
Far from the manicured selfies, enviable holiday pictures and almost obscene shopping hauls of today, an early 2010s Instagram would likely feature some amalgamation of grainy sunsets in an ‘Apollo’ filter, a Google Images screenshot of a pug and Starbucks cups, with perhaps an oversaturated photo of friends pulling the now notorious ‘duck face’ and a peace sign if you were the sentimental type.
The rise of curated profiles
As the decade advanced, so did the way we use Instagram. The cameras on our phones improved massively, and now any photo was already Instagram ready, even without filters. This was the first taste of the curated feed with #nofilter Instagrams being shared in the mid-2010s posed and lit perfectly to avoid showing any flaws.
As the use of filters declined, the amount of our lives we shared online was rising. “When I first got Instagram I would post basically anything funny, but then I started posting more and more of just my life” says 19-year-old student Annabel Otterburn, a fan of the ‘influencer look’. “I didn’t want to post things that were just entertaining, I wanted nice photos too that looked good.” We weren’t just posting whatever cute photo or screenshot we found online, we were using Instagram as a personal blog to show the best, most interesting parts of our lives.
This trend towards oversharing increased during the middle of the decade and was led, as often is in pop culture, by celebrities. The Elizabeth Taylor idea of celebrity was heightened, morphed now into an even more intense model.
We were no longer satisfied with reading about major events in celebrities’ private lives online or in tabloids, we were given – and wanted – access to every part of their lives, in real time, with no barrier between a celebrity and their audience.
This caused a big shift in the journey towards the beautified feeds of today, in that celebrities were no longer posting to please themselves, but to please their audience. This trend, as often does, then trickled downed to regular users as they tried to imitate their rich and famous role models.
While the decade progressed, so did this tendency to post for the best reaction from one’s followers, for more likes and engagement rather than their own pleasure – “Around high school, about 2016, I started being more careful about things I posted and looking nice online” says Annabel.
This mindset of Instagram as a thing to be cultivated gave way to the bona fide influencers we know today – no longer were there only popular users, but people who had turned Instagram into a craft and a profession.
The monetization of social media
These users morphed their reach into monetizable popularity, making sponsored posts or product placement in their content for thousands of pounds, depending on how many followers they have, as well as longer partnerships and endorsement deals to cash in on their following. Being an influencer was now a genuine profession that could provide financial stability, with larger influencers making millions in a year from their sponsored posts.
The end of the decade saw influencer culture lead its absolute takeover of Instagram. Filters were back on trend, but far from the grainy, homemade looking Instagram pre-sets made when the app debuted. These filters were made on third party apps like VSCO and Adobe Lightroom, tinkering with every aspect of an image (its saturation, definition, tints etc.) to automatically boost an image from its boring reality to the desirable Instagram standards of warm, bright and visually grabbing, all for the sake of an extra few double-taps.
These filters became so popular that they even began being sold, not just by the apps themselves, but by influencers who let their followers buy their ‘look’, their unique recipe for the perfect Instagram.
Talk of filters is irrelevant without mentioning the mother of all editing apps: Photoshop. Used mostly in a professional capacity in the past, to retouch idealistic images on Vogue covers and advertising campaigns, the 2010’s saw Photoshop touch every aspect of online life.
With technology advancing so fast, as well as our innate ability to use it, Photoshop became an accessible application for people to use when editing photos, led by a bevy of celebrities and influencers, including the first family of Instagram – the Kardashians.
As the family’s star power and social media reach grew, the Kardashian sisters helped popularise the more curvaceous beauty standard that was previously relegated by fashion and beauty trendsetters to rap videos. While many influencers had trainers, diet plans, genetics and surgeons on their side, many turned to Photoshop to widen their hips and pinch in their waist.
This is where cracks became very obvious in the Instagram beauty standard. “Obviously you want people to think you look good, but then you see some celebrities online and realise it’s actually impossible to look like that” says 22-year-old Amber Badham, an avid social media user who increasingly struggles with “this impossible way of life you see online”.
While there have always been unrealistic standards that pressured people, especially women, to make themselves look a certain way, the Instagram ‘look’ wasn’t even attainable to the people popularising it, leading to a self-esteem deflation not just in people following influencers who felt they could never attain the look, but to the influencers too, who also couldn’t attain the doctored look they were posting.
While this did lead to inching away from the gaudiness of the influencer lifestyle, its foundations and the beauty standard associated with it persevered. There began to be an emphasis on relatability, photos of dogs, eating pizza, toothbrushing selfies, but while influencers started posting ‘real’ photos dispersed amongst their manicured life, it was still nowhere near reality.
These photos were still edited, colour-coordinated to match their feed, posed for hours to get the perfect ‘normal’ shot, and at times even sponsored by companies. While it was nice for some to be reminded the rich and famous are somehow just like us, it also helped Instagram culture permeate every mundane aspect of life, and left many feeling like “everything I did had to be pretty and Instagrammable, even when I was alone at home” according to Amber.
Every location, every activity, every outfit was catered to be as instagrammable as possible, so much so that the word instagrammable was invented to describe the phenomenon. For many, life was now being lived according to likes and, photographed or not, every decision was catered around the internalised standards set by Instagram’s influencer culture.
TikTok and the birth of casual posting
With the standards set by influencer culture so overbearing and unattainable, it’s no surprise that a counterculture has emerged. Social media’s answer to the impossible ideals of influencer lifestyle, led both by Instagram and newest social giant TikTok, is the idea of casual posting. A self-explanatory term, the dogma of casual posting is sharing basically anything. Whatever is happening in your life, without affectation, without doctoring, without the idea of being Instagram worthy.
Whether it comes in the form of a TikTok documenting the banality of one’s life, an in the moment Instagram selfie, or the celebrity-endorsed photo-dump (a carousel of random images from a user’s camera roll), casual posting is giving a real challenge to the elusive measures set by influencer culture.
A prelude to casual posting came in the form of finstas. A finsta, or fake insta, is a secondary, private account many users have where they share posts and stories not deemed acceptable by the standards of ‘main’ Instagram’s.
This account, usually only followed by a selection of closer, trusted friends shared content that users enjoyed personally, that they wanted their friends to see, or as a visual diary, without regard to how many likes it would get. For Annabel, “it was like a diary almost that my closer friends could also see, and it was just whatever was happening in life at that point”. This primed many for the idea of casual posting, shifting their social media thought processes away from the carefully selected posts of the prior years.
Then, during the first wave of lockdowns during the Coronavirus pandemic in early 2020, we saw a social app that would become a massive catalyst for casual posting explode in popularity and influence. TikTok, originally launched in 2016 before merging with app musical.ly and rebranding, achieved large growth during 2020, with over 2 billion downloads worldwide by October 2020.
The app, based around users sharing short videos between 15 and 60 seconds, operated in a different way to other social media platforms. It has a unique algorithm that shows users videos that could be of interest to them on a ‘for you page’ and is much more egalitarian than Instagram in the sense that you don’t need a huge follower base for your posts to be seen.
If Instagram is style, TikTok is substance, and the videos shared there “are more comedy or entertainment based than on Insta[gram] and aren’t as serious a thing” according to 20-year-old Azita, who started casual posting during Summer 2020, so often the standards of beauty found on other social platforms don’t apply and users post what they enjoy and entertains them. While there is of course still some self-regulation (i.e., no one sharing something that is incredibly embarrassing or unattractive to them), it is at a level to be expected of any human and lacks the doctoring and clear posing that had been seen on Instagram.
This alternate set of expectations paved the way for the rise of casual posting’s current manifestation online. We’ve seen one-minute compilations of people’s days (under the ‘romanticising your life’ trend), photodumps (a favourite of celebrities like SZA) and the perennially popular toothbrushing selfie.
Social media users have retrained themselves and widened what they consider shareable. “I started casual posting after I saw some TikToks about it” says Azita, “and I still wanted it to look nice and pretty, but I wasn’t going out of my way to do things that would look amazing, it was just my day-to-day life”.
While reprogramming of the brain’s standards of presentability doesn’t happen overnight after seeing one video challenging the standards set by the last decade, the casual posting counterculture has helped Gen Z begin mentally, and societally, subverting the ideals set by the preceding generation online.
The content shared under the guise of casual posting is still vastly different from the photos posted on Instagram pre-influencer – not a pug or moustache in sight – which suggests that perhaps we may never rid ourselves of the automatic policing ingrained by a decade of Instagram, but the conscious decision to not be as posed and edited online has helped many to differentiate between the glamorous lives we see online and the more prosaic reality of ordinary life, and distance themselves from the toxic mindset that can come from attempting to keep up an Instagrammable lifestyle.
With casual posting and finstas being a relatively uncommon occurrence pre-2020, it’s easy to see how the Coronavirus pandemic and Black Lives Matter protests also brought about indirect change to social media and our view on influencer culture. Already ladened with the rise of self-care in the past few years that has led to a disconnect and critical interpretation of influencer culture and its consumerism-based motivations, the events of the new decade aggravated any existing grievances to new heights.
Days into worldwide lockdowns, with many coming to terms with loss of freedom, loss of family, loss of financial stability, celebrities banded together with a confusing rendition of John Lennon’s Imagine in an attempt to salve the pain inflicted by the pandemic.
The week that Los Angeles county recorded its 300,00th coronavirus case we saw Calabasas native Kim Kardashian celebrate her birthday by flying to a private island with a group of friends in an attempt to “pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time”.
After years of silence and complacency in perpetuating Eurocentric beauty standards and a series of cultural appropriation scandals, a flock of influencers took to Instagram in the wake of the killing of George Floyd to post a black square, an action which was criticised by many as performative and counterproductive as it diluted hashtags such as #blackouttuesday, #blacklivesmatter and #BLM, and when one viewed a hashtag for real posts and/or information, they were instead met with a wall of black squares.
These contributions from influencers and celebrities left a sour taste for many social media users – “it was just exhausting to look at when so much was happening in the world” says Amber – who didn’t feel like watching luxury unboxing or two-hour workout videos while they themselves were searching for purpose while stuck in their homes, pushing many users into the arms of casual posting.
Casual posting co-opted
Of course, there is an irony in casual posting being the latest online trend. The latest craze on TikTok and Instagram does of course come from a genuine desire to normalise a regular life online often, if not most of the time, but in a similar vein to influencers feigning relatability, many users casual post because it is the trend du jour of the moment.
These users are using exactly the same methods as one would to fulfil the standards of the influencer look, just to meet a different brief. Posts are still made to show off and look beautiful, but in a lowkey and dressed-down way to still fit the casual posting ‘aesthetic’. This has led to many feeling priced out of the casual posting trend, not being cool enough or having enough ‘clout’ to get away with casual posting.
This commodification of casual posting has led to casual posting influencers coming into existence. These influencers have co-opted the trend, often stripped of its original goals, instead just as posed as a typical post that shows off their clothes, looks and activities but in a ‘normal’ setting, with a softer, warm filter that fits the character of casual posting. This of course negates the entire idea of the posts being casual, as they are still thought out, edited and timed for maximum interaction.
Using the façade of casual posting, influencers and celebrities are marketing themselves, their endorsed products and their lifestyle, and monetising on a trend that was meant to counteract those exact activities online. Automatically when an influencer takes up casual posting as a way to reach new audiences, or keep their current audience engaged, it no longer is going against the traditional standards of online posting, it’s simply changing the vessel through which they are disseminated.
The future of social media?
With standards of beauty so imbued with ideals set by Instagram and influencers, it’s unlikely that casual posting could overpower the effect of a decade of influencer culture and the desire for aesthetic perfection. Ingrained ideals, a culture of consumerism online, and the use of casual posting by influencer discrediting the trend all contribute to the strong grip of the perfect, polished approach to social media.
Nonetheless, seeing regular posts on your feed dispersed amongst the otherwise picture-perfect content is a definite positive, retraining our minds to think that not every picture and post needs to edited, filtered and expensive to be acceptable and worth sharing.
In the realm of social media, while we will always favour what catches our eye and what looks beautiful to us, its valuable to see and understand that spontaneity and self-satisfaction are good and worthy reasons to share something online. A relatively new apparatus, it doubtlessly will take some time for us to understand how to navigate social in a healthy and sustainable way, but trends like casual posting are a step in the right direction.