No time to explain: What we (not) are taught by beauty bloggers on Instagram
Masha Vorslav
Instagram - and this is his plus and minus at the same time - helps to quickly deliver information to people from all over the world. And despite the fact that in progressiveness it is clearly inferior to Snapchat, it still belongs to the list of basic tools of the user of the conditional iPhone. At the same time, today, any Internet user and social networks in particular have the opportunity to study mountains of information, become a self-proclaimed expert in any field and express their opinions on any subject. There is no commission for the quality of opinions, thank God, no, but there are pluses and minuses in this.
In instagram tutorials, for example, they often give "popular" beauty recipes without any explanation (here, for example, an attractive girl takes an onion and puts it on her eyebrows.). For some reason, viral videos, where contouring is done with rulers, scotch tape, knife, banana and other non-make-up items, have become. The task of all these pieces is the same: to help hold a flat line under the cheekbone, - but why use fruits for this, why not get along with the handle of the pen or the eye? Apparently, in order to somehow surprise the user who is greedy to the spectacle.
The authors of other commercials do not use such tricks, but the make-up is shown, strictly speaking, amateurish. A makeup artist touches the lying girl with a make-up eye with her fingers over her forehead. What for? In order not to touch the face of the client once again, makeup artists buy special handheld pads - a sign of respect and good for hygiene. The other layer imposes a foundation on top of freckles and lips, although so much tonal skin is not needed, and even more so for lips. The third simply makes low-quality feathering and uneven arrow - not on purpose, but from the principle of "it will come down anyway." By the way, the format is not always good lessons began to use a good site Refinery29, but the quality of its tutorials as a whole is much higher.
The main requirements instagrama: so funny and so self
All this leads to the fact that any video that can fit in 15 seconds and falls under the main requirements of instagram can become popular: make it funny and make selfie. Some such videos may indeed be helpful. But, unfortunately, the benefit that can be derived from them is an optional, if not an accidental effect. Because such tutorials are sharpened to show themselves and gain likes. It is clear that instagram allows you to express yourself (they love him for that), but there is nothing criminal about fooling around in the front-facing camera of the phone. True, when you begin to express yourself to a wide audience, your actions should automatically be limited - or corrected - by social responsibility.
If you speak human language, then friends do not need to explain many things, and your mutual jokes can be sharp. But joking the same jokes about a stranger will not occur to anyone - he will not understand them, and in the worst case, you will wound him. The same mechanism also works with any other communication: when you communicate with a large audience, you need to think through your actions and words a hundred steps forward, so that at least you cannot say anything objectively offensive and harmful. One may argue that everyone has his own understanding of the acceptable and he can be offended at anything. But this is, excuse me, sophistry: any conscious person will not post racist jokes on Twitter and justify freedom of speech. There are things that can not be offended, and there are things that need to be calibrated depending on the size of the audience that will see them.
Like other social networks that allow you to limit the duration and volume of content, instagram satisfies the need for fractional information (today it’s really more difficult for us to concentrate on long texts and videos). But his convenience sometimes does a disservice: what you see, you have to have time to think, and not just absorb it freely. If you look closer and try to comprehend these same 15-second tutorials, then in most cases a lot of questions will arise to the author. Is it really necessary to smear a ton of foundation on yourself to make a very even face tone? Why the blogger did not make a reservation and did not inform potential viewers that this is not the only way of applying the tonal one, she just likes it that way? Why didn’t another author make a mini-note about the beneficial properties of a particular mask (and didn’t give a confirmatory link to an authoritative source) under the video, where did you put onion juice on your brows?
The wild popularity of such seemingly innocent videos indirectly proves that people rarely include critical thinking when it comes to instagram - otherwise these largely meaningless posts would not collect so much attention. The fact is that instagram and other similar applications seem insignificant to us, but at the same time we give them almost more time than their close ones. So one should not be surprised at the seriousness of the claims that are made to such seemingly harmless things as short instructional videos. They occupy the information space, they form reality and people, and therefore they should at least not be harmful.
Our hopes to gain expertise and quickly learn something useful through social networks often end with the fact that we remain in front of a bunch of tips that you cannot be sure of, and you have to clarify the truth to yourself. So the observers, or followers, remains, as always, one thing - to include awareness, which always helps the brilliant trash to choose something really valuable.