by Katie Barton|Editor-In-Chief
Senior Lauren Waite takes a new and more open approach to sharing on her instagram account. Though her main account is mostly just small collection of pictures from major holidays, life events, and trips, her spam account is a much different story. It is that account where she just dumps all her photos ranging from random walls to funny selfies for all her closest friends to see.
Instagram started as a place where people wanted to show off only the absolute best of themselves, but now that it’s in its thirteenth year of existence, teenagers are taking a different approach to posting pictures.
“I would describe photo dumping as kind of just being really casual with the way that you use social media,” Waite said. “You kind of just dump anything that you wanna share from your day and it kind of helps to build a visual for the people who follow your account.”
Originally people spent a lot of time and put a lot of effort into looking ‘good’ or ‘perfect’ on instagram, but with the rise of photo dumping people more just care about how entertaining the photos will be to their viewers.
“When I first got Instagram I didn’t do any posts, the photos had to be photoshopped there was like a whole criteria for posting them,” senior Abby De Leon said.
“But on my spam account it tends to just be like the funniest moments from my day,” Waite said. “I pick a couple that I think people will find funny.”
The type of photo dumping people do seems to be dependent on the type of account their posting on for Waite, she photo dumps mostly on her spam.
“It’s just a free for all because the only people I let follow my spam account are the people that I think are non-judgmental of me and also close enough to me that I don’t have to worry about what I’m posting, which is kind of my favorite part about having a spam account,” Waite said.
Whereas De Leon does monthly photo dumps on her personal Instagram account.
“I just like collecting the middle memories and I can like, go back and be like, oh yeah, that’s like the best of, you know, December or October, whatever month it was,” De Leon said.
Both Waite and De Leon have different reasons for posting though both were inspired by those around them.
“I had a friend that did photo dumping on Instagram, like once a month,” De Leon said. “It was a way to save her photos because she didn’t have a lot of storage, so she would just put them on Instagram.”
“My older sisters had spam accounts and I followed both of them,” Waite said. “But then one day I just realized that I was just posting so much on my main account and I just kind of started feeling annoying in comparison to everybody else even though there’s literally nothing wrong with you posting on your social media.”
Photo dumping has become a way for people to unabashedly share their lives with their friends, instead of portraying a perfect and polished look on their accounts.
“I started reverting back to like my main account mindset where I was like, oh, people find me annoying, and then a bunch of my close friends, who are the only people who follow me on [my spam], they ended up like reaching out to me and being like, ‘dude, I totally miss your super long posts because I love reading about how your day went,’” Waite said. “I know that they don’t read every single one, but at the end of the day, it’s for you and I guess in my circumstance it was for me to remember how my week went. Second off, it was because I wanted my friends to be updated with my life.”
