Synthesis

It has been established that Instagram is one of the most popular social media
sites to date, garnering over 600 million users as of 2018. With its instantaneous style
of interface and media sharing, Instagram has largely appealed to the shrinking
attention spans of the members of the current generation, making over half of its user
demographic majorly comprised of Generation Z. In line with its usage, studies show
that the motivation for users is mainly rooted in the need to be perceived as “cool”
and, the strongest motivation, the surveillance of other peoples’ lives (Sheldon and
Bryant, 2016). As the use of Instagram as a form of surveillance towards other
people’s profiles prevails, it leads to negative outcomes and complications such as
lowered self-esteem due to users comparing themselves to photos of people at the
peak of their joy. Instagram also continues to feed the notion that users must gain the
approval of others, projecting detrimental effects on users’ mental health as social
media sites have been proven to make users feel unattractive and inadequate (Brown,
2018).

All this becomes especially relevant when looking for the correlation between
Instagram use and the formation narcissistic tendencies, which this study suggests to
be a result of the former. On the matter of narcissistic tendencies, Wink (1996, p.596)
described two types of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, which were Vulnerability-
Sensitivity and Grandiosity-Exhibitionism. These types of NPD were further defined
to be associated with anxiety, and the need to be admired by others, respectively. This
study focuses purely on the narcissistic tendencies exhibited by users, and any
similarity between the character traits and habits of an Instagram user and the
symptoms of NPD will be considered without any official medical diagnosis. The
most apparent factors when spotting narcissistic tendencies are self-gratification and
regulation of self-image, both of which are some of the main uses of Instagram by
Generation Z.