It’s almost midnight as I’ve started to write this post and the reason for the time is that I’ve just watched an HBO documentary called Fake Famous (if you’ve got NowTV, you can find it on there) and I wanted to express my thoughts after watching the entire thing.
The concept of the programme is to take three people that answered an ad “do you want to be famous?” where 4,000 people applied and auditioned to take part. They created fake scenarios (e.g. staying in an expensive hotel, going to a spa or even flying in a private jet that was a set and in no way a real plane), purchased fake likes, comments and followers, then followed the journey to see what happened as they launched into the world of influencers.
I think the one comment that struck me the most was when the pandemic hit and the world came to a standstill, Dominique who was the only one left in the experiment at this point, said that the influencers who continued to post “fake” photos of trips or experiences they had seemed inauthentic and especially at a time where the world has much bigger problems. The reason is reasonated is because that’s pretty much when my life on Instagram slowed down and eventually came to a halt.
When I was regularly posting, I would take photos at the weekend of whatever outfit I was wearing and wanted to feature, then use the images throughout the week until the next time we went out to shoot photos again. I’d usually put in a comment about what it was I was doing that day or confirm if a photo was old in the cases where I didn’t have any images taken from the previous weekend.
The problem for me came when the only opportunity to take photos for my blog was on our daily walks or on our way home from food shopping each week. I wasn’t wearing the things I would normally have worn and showcased on my blog, so it felt wrong to go out of my way to get dressed up in different clothes than I was wearing on a daily basis just to share on social media. I was living in loungewear or pyjamas, so it didn’t make sense to me to share something that didn’t reflect that. Over time my posts started to dwindle until a point where I haven’t posted since July 2021 and I feel much happier for it in the sense it’s not dampening my mental health, but I do still have the guilt of not feeling that this blog is getting the attention I used to give it as a consequence.
I don’t want to give too much away about the documentary as it’s an interesting watch, but it definitely gave me both food for thought about what we see showcased online and the way in which I view social media as a whole.
For now, I’m going to stick to sharing my outfit posts on Tiktok and just hope that I can gather the same following there as I much prefer the platform – it’s a much happier place for me.
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