I am a student athlete at Florida State University and I am part of a group of female athletes denominated WILD – Women In Leadership Development - that meet weekly to debate and develop important skills for student athletes. There, we discuss important values of leaders and how to apply them in our daily routine to become a better person, to cope and help others cope with the challenges of the athletic lifestyle and consequently live a more relaxed and pleasant life.
During one of those meetings, my designated group of athletes, which was made of a few swimmers, soccer players, runners and softball players, talked about many bloggers’ Instagram pictures since it is very popular among young girls. We discussed the influence they had on numerous girls’ lives, who aspire to have a happy life but cannot fulfill the expectations created by society. As all the members of the group are female athletes that share similar lives, with challenging schedules, having to manage intense practices with their academic approach and trying to excel in both of them, we face similar hardships. We agreed that the stress we face daily and the pressure from family, friends, coaches, teammates and even ourselves to successfully reach our goals add up to the social pressure created by social media and develops an extremely stressful situation for this group of teenager, student athletes that we are part of. Because of that, we decided to analyze some Instagram pictures and compare them to our reality.
Instagram is a very popular website in which users share pictures and videos instantaneously through their phones. Initially, the apps main goal was to share square shaped pictures to relate to the outdated polaroid camera that could capture pictures instantly. However, nowadays the use of Instagram changed; multiple famous people and bloggers make intense use of filters to post "perfect pictures" with the intention to portray their “perfect life”. For instance, ### constantly posts pictures of her amazing work, which is to travel around the world with her boyfriend. Since most people do not live that reality, the desire to achieve such a good life and the existent pressure to fit in this perfect world and influence teenagers to edit their pictures to portray a fake image of themselves, especially on social media. As a result of that, our group came up with the idea of using the "hashtag" #behindthefilter for our pictures to show, with pride, the challenging, but rewarding life of female athletes. The use of hashtags “#” became a trend on multiple social media apps and their purpose is to label in an easier way what the post is about, making it easier to internet users to find posts related to what they are searching for. This #behindthefilter hashtag creates a new subgenre for Instagram pictures, with a unique purpose of showing on social media opposite realities from the ones usually portrayed. The main goal of these posts is to show the real you, without make up, filter or intensive productions, in your daily routine to prove that you do not have to change or edit yourself to proudly show the world.
The first girl from our group to post was a softball player, who posted a picture of her on her Florida State jersey during a competition with a long caption defending the sharing of people’s insecurities and flaws instead of hiding it, because they are what makes us different from the unreal reality on social media, making each person unique. In addition to that, a swimmer posted a picture of her after a long practice, with her hair still wet and her face still red. She shared that her appearance was like that most of time and that she was proud of it. She was proud of being able to practice the sport she loved and living the life she wanted, as a student athlete. Finally, she stated that she sees the beauty in spending most of her the time either working out or studying, being exhausted from practice, and wearing athletic clothes and that she hopes people can start seeing it too. Thus, posting the #behindthefilter pictures was a small way we found to value ourselves; every girl has a special way of being and that should not be judged, only esteemed. Moreover, that was a different way we found to go against the social pressure and show everyone we are proud of being who we truly are and not what others expect us to be.
Therefore, posting pictures from this creative subgenre to show who you really are, doing daily things in a simple and spontaneous way became an unusual, but special new trend among my group of friends. It became distinct because of its uniqueness; it is not only because those pictures are not expected to be posted on Instagram among multiple perfect pictures, with intensive production and edition, but because they show the most important side of everyone, the real side.