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Thursday, March 28, 2024

Photos are not just for Instagram, they immortalize memories

In my apartment, I have a little picture wall my roommates and I like to call the “Wall of Infamy,” and it’s solely dedicated to documenting any precarious situations we may have found ourselves in.

My roommates and I were scrolling through our social media accounts when one of them piped up and said, “We don’t have any pictures together.” We all collectively looked to the wall — with nearly every picture featuring us together. But those pictures are ones that will never be posted anywhere, and the only people who will ever see them are those invited to our apartment. Yet, those pictures mean more to me than any we’ve taken where we all looked perfectly posed in front of some downtown mural.

They’re real pictures, capturing our real lives. I’ve often heard people describe social media as the life we want people to see. It’s our brand to the world, a small glimpse into a perfectly curated life. I’ve always grappled with this idea of planned-out posts. It’s one of the first things we learn in the College of Journalism and Communications — think about your brand.

We’re taught from an early age to be careful what you post. In the j-school, you’re taught to figure out how you want the world to perceive you on social media. If you want to be a comedian, you better be clever. If you want to work in business, post any achievement you’ve ever had. If you want to be a reporter, never post your biased beliefs.

Every post means something, even if you don’t think it does, because it’s how the world perceives you. Most people understand that there are different versions of ourselves on different platforms, from Twitter to Facebook to Instagram. We change how we showcase ourselves because each social media calls for a different approach.

We have more access to cameras than any other generation. We have the availability to post anything at any given time, yet we still take hours deciding when is the best time to post or what kind of caption would work best. There are nearly a hundred pictures on my wall, and they all make me laugh, cringe or at least feel something. However, I would never post them because they don’t fall within the brand that I created of myself.

Whether I knew it or not, I created an online profile that is only a sliver of my life. Adults especially will say that people put everything on the internet, but that’s rarely the case. We have access to cameras in every waking moment of our lives, and we get to record every bit of it. We don’t have to put it out on our social media accounts to appreciate that those moments happened. We were there, we know how much those moments mean to us.

We owe it to ourselves to document our lives and the people in them. We get to make any memories we want, and we get to post them if we want. We can follow the brand we’ve built for ourselves, or we can it.

We just have to remember that the pictures we post don’t make the ones we save for ourselves any less valid. Those are still memories that we can cherish, and maybe even more because they’re just our own.

Michaela Mulligan is a UF journalism sophomore. Her column appears on Wednesdays.

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