I chose an Instagram post of mine to analyze. It is from way back when I was a sophomore in high school since I don’t really post on social media much at all. It is a picture of me after I won a kayak race at the beach during the summer of 2015 with the caption of “Twining Ftw!” (the caption is because I put seaweed on the trophy I was holding to make it have hair and it looked like me). I posted it because I was proud of myself and I thought I looked rad in it. I was hoping my classmates, more specifically the girl I was into at the time, saw it. I was hoping to impress them and make people think I am actually athletic, meanwhile I am the opposite. Along the same lines, there really isn’t anyone that I didn’t want to see it. If there was, then I wouldn’t post it because I was always terrified that if something could go wrong, it would for me. If there was someone that I didn’t want to see a picture, my luck would be that they would see that exact picture. Also, there wasn’t anything that I had to hide from anyone anyways, so it didn’t really matter.

I posted on Instagram because, other than Facebook, it was the only social media platform I was part of at the time. I didn’t post it on Facebook because by this time I had stopped using Facebook, using it mostly during middle school just to text people. Instagram was also popular at the time with most people using it over Facebook, so it was more prevalent. Instagram allows you to put filters over pictures as well, so you can make them look better so that was also a factor. I used the hashtags #twinning #kayaking #beach day (yes, I put a space between because I didn’t know what I was doing). Hashtags are used more on Instagram than Facebook, which is another reason I used it over Facebook. I put these in to label what the picture was while trying to be cool too.

The picture was warranted, I believed, because I had worked hard and won a contest, so I thought it was cool. I also wanted other people to know this almost to show off using ethos to show that I can win a contest and be good at something.