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Dual Instagram users are mostly in their teens and part of their double life is to hoodwink prying parents.
Dual Instagram users are mostly in their teens and part of their double life is to hoodwink prying parents. Photograph: Mikael Buck/REX/Shutterstock
Dual Instagram users are mostly in their teens and part of their double life is to hoodwink prying parents. Photograph: Mikael Buck/REX/Shutterstock

Rinstagram or Finstagram? The curious duality of the modern Instagram user

This article is more than 7 years old

Behind many Instagram accounts featuring filtered selfies and sunkissed beaches is a second account reserved for close friends and full of wilfully unattractive shots

Social media has given us many things: selfies, shelfies, belfies; this week Miranda July liveblogged her dentist visit. It has also given us online status anxiety, a pervasive fear of missingout and may be affecting our mental health. Recently, it has produced the curious conceit of the dual Instagram account; in which users have two Instagram accounts, one reserved for their close friends, and another for anyone who wishes to follow them.

“Rinstagram” and “Finstagram”, then. Account users have their real-Instagram (their rinsta) which has high follower numbers and offers a more polished and performative visual narrative. Think classic Instagram. Filtered selfies. Pleasing photos of food. Drink poised in air, quixotic rural or seaside landscape in the background. Their fake-Instagram (their finsta) is a second Instagram account reserved for their close friends. With low follower numbers (followers are usually kept in the low double figures), they use this account to share more candid pictures of their lives – often wilfully unattractive ones, pulling faces and the like.

Users are mostly in their teens and part of their double life is to hoodwink prying parents. They’ll allow parents access to their performative, public account; but the secret more ungainly account, (often under an assumed name) is kept under wraps, just for pals. This split online identity has found its way into the lives of people who really shouldn’t have to hide their proclivities from their parents.

Wholesome, perfected shots are the hallmarks of a classic Rinstagram account. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Kim Easton Smith is a freelance travel journalist and digital media consultant. Smith runs two Instagram accounts, one public account documenting her travels and another private account, which features images from her day-to-day life. She initially set up her public-facing travel account so as not to annoy her friends with smug travel shots and to “shamelessly hashtag”. The public account is very much an extension of her personal brand; targeted and strategic. Her personal account makes for a relief from that.

“I made the other one private earlier this year when I took a break from work. Before, I felt that as a journalist, I needed to have an online presence that looked cool and zeitgeisty; like I had my finger on the pulse. Eventually, I decided to give it a rest, changing my account to private, updating my profile to not say much about me.”

Smith admits she does think about how she looks on Instagram, putting it down to the permanence of the platform. While Twitter might be used for transient opinions or throwaway remarks, Instagram feels more like an enduring chronicle.

“I use it as a memory aid and love scrolling back through it, so I choose the moments I want to share.”

Nancy Elizabeth Cunliffe is a folk musician who has always used Instagram to document pictures of her day-to-day life, curios that captured her imagination and updates on her music career. She recently set up a separate private account to specifically document a long hike she took across Spain.

“I may not want to share a picture of an outstanding paella with most of my followers, but I certainly want to record it for my memory’s sake.”

As a musician, Cunliffe has a somewhat public life and so relishes the opportunity to keep some things just to herself.

“It’s nice to keep a little bit private in an era when it feels mandatory to share everything with people you have never met. My private account is more boring. I uploaded a picture of the gear in my backpack for my hike. That is pretty uninteresting to most people.”

A study conducted earlier this year determined three quarters of British people admit to lying about themselves on social media. There have been instances of people successfully faking their lives, such as the Cosmopolitan writer who fabricated an entire relationship with a few carefully constructed photographs. Are we more comfortable blurring the lines of reality and fantasy online? What is perhaps most interesting about the Rinstagram and Finstagram phenomenon is how the public facing, performative account is deemed our real account, while the private, more honest account is our fake Instagram. Are we privileging our branded, public identities over our private, honest selves?

‘How we filter reality online is not that different to a conversation with a friend’ – Dr. Valentina Cardo

Dr. Valentina Cardo, a lecturer in Social Media and Network Culture at the University of Southampton, thinks we read too greater distinction into how we interact online and off.

“We mostly have the freedom to represent ourselves in different ways. We do not always fully disclose. How we filter reality online is not that different to a conversation with a friend. Narratives of the self always contain an element of self-censorship.”

Cardo determines the performativity of Instagram less a false representation of our lives and more “technologically optimistic”.

“We are always performing. In every social interaction we are to a degree performing. We are constantly filtering the content from our lives. You don’t tell a friend about when you went to the toilet. It is no different; just that Instagram allows us the control to more accurately perform an idealised life.”

Every image, Cardo believes, is a message – you are communicating something about your status and your lifestyle no matter who the audience are or what the intention is.

Scope released research in 2014 revealing over 60% of people said social media makes them feel inadequate about their own lives. Does she recognise a certain pressure to conform to an idealised life? Is a private, less-filtered account of your narrative, your Finstagram, an escape from this? Cardo believes there are spaces for performance and spaces for intimacy online in the same way as there is during face-to-face socialisation. It is important, she thinks, to consider how we interact with Instagram and other social networks not as a platform for broadcasting, but as a tool for conversation.

“Instagram is an interaction and by simply following a person online we are actively participating in it.”

Does she see this dedicated space for communicating with our close friends as a move towards the humble, presumed virtues of social networking; that it is less about performing and more for connecting and keeping in touch with our friends.

“There is a capacity for both to coincide. And that is not just possible but completely OK.”

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