No tweenage movie is complete without a diary read aloud, ripped apart or flushed down a toilet. After pouring your heart and soul onto the pages of a book, it’s hair-raising to imagine that your vulnerability might, quite literally, be hung over your head. In time, what these films treat like a childhood fear is turned into an inevitability: Someday, by force, carelessness or sheer passage of time, you will lose control of your best-kept secrets — so long as they are put to paper.
Online, that privacy is dead on arrival. To companies like Cambridge Analytica, those interests, secrets and private inclinations all look like one thing: data. In turn, this data is sold to third-party organizations to turn a profit, a customer or even an election. As an individual user, you must watch what you say, even if you delete it. In fact, you don’t even have to say anything; linger on a TikTok for too long, and they get the memo.
There’s no telling how deep this goes. Up against algorithms that consume billions of data points, it’s no wonder so many assume everything’s on display. This should strike terror into the old-school diarist: Is honesty even possible if something’s always watching?
We know. And we revel in it.
We adore the mythical “FBI man” digging through our search histories, watching through our laptop cameras. Our notes apps, those terrifying amalgams of grocery lists and breakup texts, are spun into a source of humor. Most tellingly, our private diaries have a follower count.
At the advent of Instagram, the average account was composed of polished selfies and food pics. This was enough — until the novelty of the avocado toast wore off. From around 2015, users began creating secondary pages, free from the eyes of family and employers. Enter: the finsta. A portmanteau of “fake Instagram,” these accounts were repositories for anything too eclectic for the rinsta (“real Instagram”). Typically slapped together from what i-D Vice calls “a vortex of moody selfies, memes, and life updates,” finstas logged the private feelings and experiences of their owners — in other words, they were diaries.
Crucially, though, the finsta was open for others’ view. Friends would get a record of every fun party, every boring weekend, every mental breakdown. Is this not the antithesis of the diary?
Diaries are for the weird, the off-brand, the off-putting; it is in these unspeakable topics that diarists derive the most value. Guaranteed privacy, writers could address their issues directly, wasting no words on context or explanation. With an audience, finsta users had to reconsider their “entries.” Would readers be hurt? Worry for the poster’s safety? Call the police, even? To prevent this, captions end up euphemistic, or cloaked in sardonic humor, instead of candid self-admissions. Under this level of self-surveillance, the value of the diary is lost.
I’m no stranger to the practice. Scroll back to March 12, 2020, and you would find my first “quarantine log”: a daily recount of life under COVID-19, plus a collage of photos and screenshots. Meanwhile, in a beat-up black Moleskine, I’d periodically report those same events, for my eyes only. For 400 days, the two records ran in parallel — but the same nights would be narrated much differently. When the witching-hour thoughts reached a crescendo, I’d first reach for the Moleskine, and they’d be spelled out with a felt Micron. On the finsta, those cries for help were watered down, distilled into vague and aimless angst. My friends couldn’t know, I thought, so they didn’t. For 400 days I languished, all for fear of what they’d think.
But, over and over, I’m forced to recognize that “what they’d think” is kinder than you’d ever expect. Acquaintances that felt your absence on a sick day. That boy who surely doesn’t feel the way you do — but does, and more. A bench gone cold, left empty where regulars expect you to take your seat. So many tears are spent on how they’ll see you. But this vulnerability is the reward of being loved. It is so easy to forget.
After many dutiful days of journaling, your day-to-day problems begin to look like patterns. This is equally true of others’ diaries, too: After a while on someone’s finsta, patterns emerge there, too. A friend group that’s treating her badly. An alcohol habit he just can’t seem to kick. A hot-and-cold relationship you’re rooting against. Without much — or ever — speaking to someone, you become an insider to their mental maladies. It borders on the parasocial.
Though I’ve since deleted Instagram, I found that those times were far from forgotten. After senior prom, former followers signed my yearbook lovingly — in ways that we’d never said to each other in person. An unspoken camaraderie had formed there, backstage of our separate social lives. For a long time I couldn’t see this; in my mind, those friends were just an audience. I was busy fearing their reproach, and that made being open all the more risky.
A finsta is a space built out of the people you trust. But, by virtue of its construction, those people become a “public,” and your feelings a matter of public relations. Posting doesn’t feel like confiding in a friend, but announcing to a crowd. In this environment, it’s near-impossible to recreate the absolute safety of a diary.
As the finsta phenomenon recedes into the rearview, its value transforms from an emotional outlet to a historical record. The human brain edits out large, featureless stretches of time; thus the long, everyday reality of the COVID-19 pandemic becomes a blip in memory. As the “two-week break” turned into a year-long quarantine, the finsta became what Elena Cavender called documentation of a “microgeneration’s adolescence.” Taken together, these individual narratives process an adolescence of “trying times”: of breakdown, loss and regrowth. More broadly, they are proof that you survived your teenage years, and lived to tell the tale. Finstas, among other resources, may well be the only way to itemize these awkward, painful years of history.
So read your finsta and cringe, but reserve your judgment: That teen not only lived through it, but had the courage to speak out. I know I owe my younger self much debt.
Daily Arts Writer Amina Cattaui can be reached at aminacat@umich.edu.