Identity: A Trend

How the photo-editing app VSCO is defining many teens’ identities

BY LAUREN SMITH AND ASHLEE HALL

With her oversized t-shirt precariously knotted, Carmex along with a plastic straw kept safely in her Kanken, and seventeen scrunchies lining her arm, she grabs her hydro-flask and braces herself for the extravagant sleepover ahead. A sticker-laiden laptop sits open with Netflix pulled up, next to it, Mario Badescu spray readily waiting for use. Friendship bracelet in progress, and over-the-top sundaes situated on the sherpa-rug floor of a room dimly lit by fairy lights. In her mind, these casual parties and a low-rigor lifestyle are her right.

The notorious phrase ‘VSCO girl’ has been thrown around since summer to describe the basic teenage girl— an image that has evolved into a human archetype. Although VSCO started as an app for photo-editing, the “republish” feature has been dominated by teenage girls, a trend similar to the Instagram hashtags from a few years ago.

“People like to build their VSCO feed into a specific aesthetic,” sophomore Stella Hill, a VSCO user, said. “But I think it is still very much about the photography art.”

Hill says she typically just uses the app for her own photo-editing but does check her feed occasionally. Although some have become aware of the unrealistic notion that VSCO radiates, many young and impressionable teens are left allowing themselves to believe what social media is feeding them.

“It gives you this one set of ideas of who the perfect person is,” Hill said. “That’s just not how it is.”

Phases in social media are quite common. They tend to come and go as teenagers wish. However, these trends are affecting teenagers’ ability to be their own person.

“There are people who go to what is completely normal and trendy, and then there are the ones who, like, are “quirky” and they are “different” but the same… they fit in with a group of people who all call themselves different,” says Stella. The groupings associated with social classes in a teen’s life have a huge influence on how they present themself. “You have to be a certain way and you have to act like this and act like that in order to be apart of the social hierarchy class that you are in,” adds Carly Snyder, another sophomore on VSCO. Being different in minor ways is considered cool, but it has to be predictable and labeled. The mom friend, the crazy one, or the chill, retro one- that’s how the rewritten definition “quirky” works.

Ultimately, even a teen’s originality must be a popular identity. Media should be spreading ideas. It should be bringing them topics they haven’t considered yet, opening their minds by bringing themselves new viewpoints.

Rather than sharing food for thought, teens on VSCO are merely re-exposing themselves to the same mindset repeatedly. The pressure to have a consistent feed that they align themselves with, especially one identical to everyone else’s, is the opposite of originality.

A teenager typically forgets to think to the future, living in the here-and-now, and most would readily agree that they care too much what people think. San Diego professor Jean Twenge states that “teens today are less likely to do adult things,” even adding that “today’s 18-year-olds are like the the 15-year-olds of the past.”

Teens are forgetting that they’re still growing, that they don’t have to categorize themselves to fit in. It’s limiting them. They might not want to read it, but here’s a question for teens - are you really happy when you’re defined like this? “You have to be a certain way, and you have to act like this, and act like that, in order to be apart of the social hierarchy class that you are in”