The Linkedinification of Instagram

On uniformity, branding, and reality

I created my Instagram account in the spring semester of my freshman year in high school. I never posted on Instagram until college, considering myself to have made a clean break from high school (a lesson I learned, not related to this article, is that there is no such thing as a clean break from high school). Initially, I posted photos of friends and trips to museums, imitating artsy Pinterest pictures of girls with their backs turned to the camera. If I were to pinpoint the moment I started to take Instagram “seriously” it would have to be when I uncovered my parent’s digital camera from a box in the storage closet of their basement. The first photos I took on the camera were from a trip to France in the summer of 2023, not knowing that I’d captured the essence of our current age of Instagram. At the end of summer 2024, I took stock of my Instagram timeline. Every post I scrolled through featured a girl, usually in an expensive or faux-expensive outfit, posed against the backdrops of sunsets in the Caribbean and cathedrals in Prague. The sheen of digital and film camera lenses glosses over every image. These photos are typically combined with a quippy, ironic one-liner, often set to a trending sound on TikTok. I was guilty of doing the same; my last Instagram post is me perched on a bridge in Venice with the caption “Attenzione, pickpocket!” from a viral internet video. Of course, most people follow others from their childhood hometown, so it makes sense that people with similar cultural, class, and educational experiences would have similar posts. But I’d argue that the uniformity I’m speaking to will be present on anyone’s Instagram feed, no matter who they are.

The idea for this essay came to me through a TikTok trend, which, as embarrassing as it may be to admit, is where most of my inspiration comes from. The trend involves people submitting their Instagram profiles to ChatGPT for an “honest review.” The results are often brutal critiques, suggesting that the Instagrammer lacks creativity or depth on their page. 

We might laugh at the callousness of AI at the moment, but it’s right. This Tiktok trend is breaking the fourth wall: we are all aware of what Instagram is. Do you have a photo of yourself in Prague? No? Oh. What about a picture of you in a little black dress at your sorority’s date party? Not that one either? What about you in a bikini at Miami Beach? Before social media, people lived life and happened to take photos during the moment. Now, the photos are the moment. We create moments to take photos of them. Couples hire photographers for pregnancy announcements and graduation photoshoots can cost students $200, all for the purpose of flexing on their Instagram feeds. Most people I know, myself included, plan their social events around the pictures they want to take, fine-tuning their outfits (usually with the help of fast fashion websites) to match the occasion. I know multiple people who would exclusively wear sweatpants and hoodies except for when it was time to take pictures. At times, it feels as though our existence has become validated only by the presence of cameras.

What all our Instagram feeds have in common is conformity. There are slight variations to this conformity: the indie sleaze variant, the artsy girl variant, the sporty girl variant (basically, the only choice we are allowed in aesthetics is which Spice Girl we prefer). We have made Instagram the LinkedIn of our social lives. For those who don’t know, LinkedIn is a platform where users showcase their job history and valuable skills, which recruiters and coworkers use to contact and follow them. The idea is that through this platform, you can seek jobs and connections. Instagram serves the same purpose but for our social lives. Our page is essentially our resume, and the commentators on our posts are our referrals and endorsements. When we comment and like, it’s a public stamp of approval: yes, we want to be associated with this person. We scrutinize the commentators to judge the quality of the poster’s social circle, but also to find potential new connections. Unlike LinkedIn, we aren’t doing this for future employers or recruiters. So, who are we doing this for? We have essentially become our own PR agents, but for what audience? We seem to be advertising to our followers, saying “Hey, look at this picture of me having fun. I am friend-worthy material.” And we follow people who we see or envy as potential friends, creating an echo chamber far removed from real life. And speaking of real life, what happens to the connections we make IRL? If we meet someone but they don’t match our Instagram theme or stray from conformity, do we view them differently? It seems as though we are arming ourselves with the tools of the internet but not considering what happens when we enter the real world.

According to philosopher Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation, “Such would be the successive phases of the image: it is the reflection of a profound reality; it masks and denatures a profound reality; it masks the absence of a profound reality; it has no relation to any reality whatsoever; it is its own pure simulacrum.” In the case of Instagram, I’d argue its purpose was to be a reflection of reality but is currently masking reality. When I look at my mother’s Instagram account versus mine, I see a stark difference. She posts blurry photos of my brother’s graduation set to an on-the-nose cover of Post Malone’s “Graduation.” I post carefully choreographed images of myself in a trendy two piece set, every angle and corner carefully contoured. She posts the reality that exists. I post the reality that I created.

“I don’t post on Instagram; I archive the pictures and unarchive them later,” my friend told me a few months ago. She admits that it has become embarrassing to post on Instagram; she doesn’t want to be perceived. Why is that the case? Our options seem to be either being our authentic selves and letting that shame wash over us or becoming an integrated part of our timelines. We view ourselves on a binary scale: either authentic and unappealing or uniform and hollow.

When I look at my Instagram page, I see a city girl who’s always ready to party. I can’t lie: sometimes it’s fun to be a part of the Instagram game. I get a thrill from planning the future of my posts, like a visionary director bringing their story to life. A year in advance, and I can already plan out what my Instagram feed will look like, I moderate and mold images of myself to fit exactly that. But let me be clear: what we are choosing to do is to smoothen our images of ourselves, to appear as seamless as possible. We want to be one with the algorithm. Instagram makes its money from ads, and it’s not hard to tell when scrolling. On my timeline, nearly one out of every three posts is an ad for some beauty product or athleisure company. But what about the posts in between the ads? Some would call them their friend’s Instagram posts; to me, all I see are more ads.