So, what’s the difference between rinstagram and finstagram? As if we haven’t heard enough of social media destroying relationships, now we’re hearing about young girls creating different accounts, like “rinsta” and “finsta”, real instagram and fake instagram.
In these cautionary findings, you will be shocked to know that even the most reputable technology organizations are not yet aware of what is going on behind the closed doors of adolescents and children. Parents, this is beyond scary. And no, this is not a trend. This is real life. It’s about the double lives that daughters around the world are living, and hiding from their parents and families. For parents who assume that their kids are happy and well adjusted, think again. Girls as young as 10 years old are filtering images and creating a whole other world and living lies behind their filtered accounts and pretty little pictures (or rather, pretty little lies).
*"Young women growing up on Instagram are spending a significant chunk of each day absorbing others' filtered images while they walk through their own realities, unfiltered," writes Kate Fagan. "In a recent<a href="http://www.girlscouts.org/research/publications/girlsandmedia/image_and_social_media_survey.asp"> survey</a> conducted by the Girl Scouts, nearly 74 percent of girls agreed that other girls tried to make themselves look 'cooler than they are' on social networking sites."
So what do we make of all this, and how do we, as parents, keep up with the insanity that continues to fester in cyberspace? The alarming efforts that girls are putting forth to edit and crop their emotions are way more disturbing than just editing or cropping the images they’re posting. Teenage girls are obsessing and spending an exorbitant amount of hours each day checking and editing their real images, and consumed with what captions they’re going to place before even posting. And while they’re busy doing that, they’re also busy checking the amount of “likes” they’re receiving, scrolling and fixating on the pictures and postings of others, and sadly comparing their own lives to the filtered images of others.
The real instagram, “rinsta”, shows all the cool, close to perfect shots, while the fake instagram, “finsta”, shows the imperfections, non-edited, non-filtered images (not usually seen by family). So, really, what this portrays is nothing more than lost identities, girls hiding behind their “rinstas”, and drowning in the hopes that they’ll never live a true, authentic life. “Oh darling, look how cute you look in this picture, and such a sweet smile”, says mommy to her daughter. “Glad you like it”, replies the daughter to her mom, hiding from all the sadness, embarrassment, depression, and painful emotions she can’t bear to reveal.