Being Real on Fake Instagram: Likes, Images, and Media Ideologies of Value

Abstract

This article elucidates how some users of the app Instagram follow particular rules—shaped by the medium's material constraints and affordances as well as social norms and pressures—to get as many likes as possible. I demonstrate how my interlocutors, young adult women in the United States, strategize their Instagram usage with creative practices in an effort to successfully accrue likes. But the pressure to perform in such a way lead some of them to create secondary accounts called “fake Instagrams” where these rules could be broken and users believe they can be more authentic. I analyze the importance of likes to social media use and how this feature structures the media ideologies users hold. Demonstrating how users trade the value of likes in one mode of Instagram for the value of authenticity in another, I show that media ideologies and media switching—conventionally analyzed between media—occur within them as well. These ideologies determine how users project different selves within a single medium, selves which are in dialogue with one another on social media.

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