Instagram Mind Games
Mind games aren’t just for the ‘real’ world, they penetrate far into our online communities and seem to be a regular fixture of social media, especially perhaps the most pretentious of them all, Instagram.
And often the guiltiest are our so called ‘friends,’ or dare I say it, maybe even ourselves.
According to UK Glamour Magazine, there are a range of categories of Instagram mind games and as I read through them a mental explosion was seriously occurring within my cranium because the accuracy was OUT OF THIS WORLD.
While I fully understand that social media is often only the showy, pretty, heavily filtered version of our lives I still think that the authentic people out there also occasionally post something without setting it up (you know without asking people to pretend to laugh) or editing it for ten minutes prior to posting it.
But it isn’t just the faking game being played on Instagram there are whole array of them, from ‘Double Tap Teammates’, ‘Smooth Operators’ to ‘Hype Girls.’
Here are just some of the ‘Gram Games’ that Samantha McMeekin from UK’s Glamour Magazine, says people love to play.
Let’s start with one that perhaps is a little more on the innocent side, perhaps an even unspoken rule of the Instagram Game world, Double Tap Teammates.
Double Tap Teammates - are our allies, something McMeekin says are “essential in a game where likes and follows are the symbol of status and power.” They are the ones that will always ‘heart’ our posts even if they don’t like them. Perhaps our actual family members or our BFFs of the real world are our teammates that will always have our back. But who they are doesn’t matter, as long as we can succeed in this Instagram world where the numbers are all that really count.
Smooth Operators – Now this is where the fakers really show their stuff. They have all the relevant apps to easily edit their pics without looking like they try too hard, The Facetune, Perect365 and Airbrush apps. McKeekin says, “they’ll say it is good lighting, the right angle…but really, they’ve just altered their selfie with one wave of their Facetune fairy wand.”
And here is when people I know start pop, pop, popping into my head as I remember their orchestrated picture set ups, quick swipe and tapping to beautify their reality and often their exceptionally smoothed out faces being posted in their most recently extravagant adventure as if this is how everyone always lives.
But as McMeekin so accurately points out “they can turn Lambrini into Moet until they become so drunk on their own power that they begin to over-edit, to the point where their feed features an entirely different person.”
Yep, or until they get so confused between the real them and the Instagram them that even they can’t tell anymore.
Hype Girls– Definitely the most cringe worthy of the Gram Gamers, Hype Girls are the ‘YASSSSSS QUEENS’ of your followers. They shower you with compliments, “that skin”, “tell me where hat dress is from, NOW”, “How are you even real?!” You know the ones. But McMeekin says that “you won’t keep your Hype Girls for long, unless you repay the favour.”
Because it’s Instagram, even the compliments aren’t real and unless you say all the right ones back, there will be no more for you, no more likes and perhaps even an ‘unfollow’…
The endless mind games that are both shallow and harmful really offer nothing good to us at all, yet so many of us keep on posting, liking, keep on commenting, keep on watching and keep on following. The biggest issue with Instagram is that there is never a time where gamers can reach their ultimate level of happiness because numbers are limitless. You can always try to get more followers, more likes and more comments but until you are actually yourself and happy with it, Gram Gaming will never bring you joy.
But I guess that is the whole point of Instagram isn’t it?