Digital Life

This woman faked a trip to Disneyland on Instagram to make a point.

By now we all know that not everything we see on the internet is exactly as it seems, but one blogger went as far as to hack her own Instagram to show her followers just how easy it is to fool everyone into thinking your life if something it&#39;s not.Carolyn Stritch is a photographer who documents her adventures on The Slow Traveler blog. Her Instagram is filled with dreamy snaps from all over the world:         View this post on Instagram           I haven&#39;t done a #mymagicalmirror post in a while. This isn&#39;t magic, though. This is me, nine in the morning, in front of our neighbour&#39;s window, working out the angles, rolling around in muddy wet grass. A post shared by  Carolyn (@theslowtraveler) on Oct 25, 2017 at 10:02am PDT         View this post on Instagram           Last day in San Cristobal before a LONG bus journey to Puerto Escondido. I&#39;m sure a bungalow on the beach will be worth the 17-hour ride. I&#39;ll miss this beautiful town. A post shared by  Carolyn (@theslowtraveler) on Mar 23, 2016 at 10:52am PDT         View this post on Instagram           I took the train to Harrogate, down in Yorkshire, for first leg of an extraordinary journey with @taylors, @creatingforgood, and a bunch of my favourite Instagrammers. We stayed in a swanky hotel (found time for a quick shoot, obviously) but manged to lower the tone by laughing aloud at the &#34;funny-sounding&#34; food names on the taster menu. I attended a workshop with a couple of very inspiring ladies, @jessonthames and @belleannee, where we talked about storytelling ... By the way, tea and coffee tasting? It&#39;s not as elegant as it sounds. Lot&#39;s of slurping and spitting going on. But, for a bona fide coffeehound like me, it was amazing to learn about the stuff I chug by the gallon. Thanks to all involved! I brought home a ton of new ideas. Here&#39;s to the next leg... #cfgextraordinaryjourney #sponsored A post shared by  Carolyn (@theslowtraveler) on Oct 13, 2017 at 12:50pm PDTOn March 10, she uploaded this picture of her sipping tea in bed. Nothing out of the ordinary here, right?https://www.instagram.com/p/BgJpx9On3od/?taken-by=theslowtraveler&quot;Tomorrow, I&#39;m going to be 22! I&#39;m treating myself with a trip to Californ-I-ay: I&#39;m off to Disneyland to Instagram the hell out of Sleeping Beauty&#39;s Castle,&quot; wrote Stritch in the caption. &quot;I&#39;ll be putting myself to bed nice and early tonight: I&#39;m flying tomorrow and coming home Monday (need a magic carpet, not an aeroplane). I&#39;ll be by myself, but so what? It&#39;ll be my very own fairytale. Human possibilities vastly exceed our imagination!&quot;Next came this inevitable picture of Carolyn posing in front of Sleeping Beauty&#39;s castle:https://www.instagram.com/p/BgMf3Pfn94g/?taken-by=theslowtravelerStritch said that none of her followers suspected that anything was up, and neither did her family or friends.But how did she manage to take a picture in front of the castle without it being obstructed by crowds, screaming kids or wandering employees?By completely faking it.In a post on The Slow Traveler blog page, Stritch explained that she faked the trip to Disneyland as a part of a social experiment to show how easy it is to make our lives look perfect on social media. She writes that she was inspired to do so after reading a book called Selfie: How We Became So Self-Obsessed and What It&rsquo;s Doing To Us by Will Storr.First she downloaded FaceApp (for a mere &pound;1.99!) and edited her selfies to look flawless: No makeup required! Carolyn StritchThen she posed in bed, further enhanced the photo, and slapped on that cutesy caption. By the way, Carolyn is 32, not 22.Photoshopping herself into the Disneyland photo was fairly simple as well.No one knew that the entire thing was a lie until she uploaded this video:https://www.instagram.com/p/BgO5eTRnZbN/?taken-by=theslowtraveler&quot;I&#39;m not feeling entirely myself after that trip. Strange. Tomorrow I&#39;ll share a blog post telling you all about it. It&#39;s not every day you get to say: &quot;I&#39;m going to be 22 and I&#39;m taking my self to Disneyland.&quot; Well, back to reality,&quot; wrote Carolyn in the caption. &quot;Hard to believe that just yesterday I was standing alone outside Sleeping Beauty&#39;s Castle. But I&#39;ll always have The Image.&quot;The next day, Stritch wrote a blog post coming clean and reflecting on the experiment: Instagram is really good at escapism, the aspirational, the inspirational. So I try to get those things into pictures I post. Nobody wants to see me in my pyjamas, with my explosive morning hair, hunched over my laptop on the sofa. That&rsquo;s how I spend most of my days. You want to see my books, my windows, my travel photography, same as I want to see the best bits of your daily lives. But there&rsquo;s a line. 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&rsquo;s both responsible and good. And I need your help. Let&rsquo;s stick together, help each other out, and make Instagram even better. To read Stritch&#39;s blog post in full, click here.

By now we all know that not everything we see on the internet is exactly as it seems, but one blogger went as far as to hack her own Instagram to show her followers just how easy it is to fool everyone into thinking your life if something...