Do you ever wonder if what you're looking at on Instagram is real? One blogger decided to see how attentive her followers were, by hacking her own Instagram and creating some manipulated content.
Yep, she did what anyone would do faced with Photoshop and a world of possibilities - she took herself to Disneyland.
Carolyn, aka The Slow Traveler, wrote a blog post about why she'd decided to hack her Instagram and pretend she was in front of Sleeping Beauty's castle, and it's really quite thought-provoking.
It all started when Carolyn downloaded FaceApp and was horrified by how much her face had changed. "Staring back at me, wearing my clothes, sitting in my bed, is a stranger. Or, perhaps more accurately: it's my perfect self", she said.
This then inspired her to see how far she could take the deception: "I came up with a story: my FaceApped perfect self, who's ten years younger than I am, flies off to Disneyland for the day, and somehow manages to photograph herself all alone in front of Sleeping Beauty's Castle", she wrote in her post.
"I manipulated images, captioned them with a fictional narrative, and presented them as real-life. I hacked my own Instagram account."
Carolyn wanted to see if her followers would question the photos in any way; how she suddenly was 10 years younger, why her face had changed, and how she managed to take a picture without a single soul at one of the world's busiest tourist attractions.
While she perhaps has staged pictures before, she'd never put herself in fake situations.
"In this project, I crossed that line, went way, way over it so I could work backwards and figure out how far I can reasonably go and still make work that's both responsible and good."
Carolyn is asking her followers to respond to the post offering their thoughts behind social media and 'truth', so she can continue her research.
