Instagram gives cruelty a whole new platform

MY mental health is fine in the real world, but it’s not robust enough for social media, writes Claire Harvey. No wonder it’s damaging our teens.

REMEMBER that feeling from the playground — being picked last for a team?

Or the moment you found out you weren’t invited to whatever was the party of the moment?

That’s what Instagram is like for young women, and it is relentless. Every party. Every night out. Every day of shopping, every morning run in the park with a friend, every cafe catch-up. Each of these is a moment for presenting a ­curated slice of one’s life, and then waiting for the likes and the comments to flow.

And it is driving them to misery.

Stop it, you’re making me feel so fat! ;) OMG could you be any prettier?

I had a small insight into the life of a millennial chick a month or so ago when I momentarily reinstalled Instagram on my phone to check out the shots of a truly sensational party I’d been to.

I knew everyone would be posting, and I was loving scrolling through the pictures of this glamorous and deeply adult event.

Then I found the one that pointedly did not include me. It was a group of friends I’d been sitting with, and it was taken when I’d momentarily left to go to the bathroom or something. So there they were, the girlfriends, all having the time of their lives together, and I wasn’t there.

Now, I’m a 40-year-old woman with a perfectly fine sense of self-esteem, genuine friends, a family who loves me and plenty of love. I have nothing to complain about.

But this image was like a stab to the heart.

Where was I? Why would this photo — this one frame from the whole evening that did not include me — be the one that was posted?

Of course, I know why. It was the one that made everyone look totally gorgeous, and the one that happened to have the best light and the most flattering angle. The choice of image actually had nothing to do with me. It says something pretty uncool about me that I wasn’t able to just enjoy it as a snapshot of someone else’s fabulous time. But I wasn’t able to enjoy it at all.

It made me feel really low.

Social media gives teens a whole new platform to exercise cruelty. (Pic: iStock)

And thus, I’ve realised my mental health (never been a problem in the real world, thank God) is just not robust enough for social media.

I’m grateful for the realisation. But I’m scared for all our daughters. If I felt like that, with all my hitherto outlined advantages and perfectly rational reasons for not feeling bad, then how does a slightly tubby and awkward 15-year-old girl, or a 21-year-old with the average range of normal feminine neuroses, feel about herself when she sees an image, or a comment, or lukewarm reaction to a post, or a total absence of likes?

When I was in primary school, the mean girls (that is, the pretty, slim girls with fresh complexions and glossy hair-ribbons) started inviting new girls into their ‘group’. The girls they chose weren’t total outsiders or losers; they were just normal girls, all of whom had their own little friendship groups of other normal, slightly daggy kids.

The mean girls would fawn over these new arrivals for a couple of days, and then they would tell them: “You’re out of the group.”

Their victim, mortified, would slink off in hot tears of humiliation.

The real cruelty of it was that when she tried to return to her original friends, they would quite understandably be stung that she had abandoned them so quickly for the cool crowd, and they’d be reluctant to take her back.

This, thank God, never happened to me. But I saw it happen to about six girls like me, and I’ve never forgotten its ­calculated unkindness.

My point: this is how young women are. They can be casually, and often calculatedly, cruel. They regard inclusion as of the ultimate importance. They use the power of exclusion all the time, to make all kinds of subtle points to one another. They know how to do this from well before puberty. And they never forget. As adults, this is how they bully other women in the workplace; with careful acts of rejection and exclusion.

It has always been this way, I imagine. But now cruelty has a whole new platform, and it follows a girl home, in her pocket or her clutch. It sits on her bedside table, just waiting to deliver forth sadness and criticism.

The good part? I know all this about myself now. I can see it all with relative dispassion. And I’m not 28 years old, or 17, or 13. I can delete Instagram without it seriously ­hampering my social life.

And, hopefully, I’ve got some time to think about how I will help my children navigate it all.

Originally published as Instagram gives cruelty a whole new platform