There’s an impenetrable world of teenagers on social media and I so badly want to understand it.

When I was an adolescent, the preferred destroyer-of-self-esteem was MySpace and, of course, there wererules. Strict rules. You had to put your very best friend in your Top Eight, or you might as well have told the whole school they were a loser. You had to have a side fringe, and at least one photo from a very high angle, revealing only one eye and half your face. You HAD to reply ‘thnx 4 tha add :)’ when someone added you, and you HAD to reply to their comments on your page.

You also had to have a PhD in HTML coding and there was a prerequisite of poor taste in graphics and mainstream taste in music, but that’s beside the point.

Now, however, I’m completely out of touch with what the ‘rules’ are. And whatever they are, I’m definitely not following them.

Wait...there are RULES?! Image via Giphy.

So I decided it was time for some #research (see, I can hashtag), and asked my super-cool-Instagrammer-teenage-cousin Caitlin, who just turned 18, to explain the rules to me. I've never felt so a) old and b) ...silly.

Here they are, in no particular order.

Your Instagram needs a theme.

WOAH. Your Instagram needs awhatnow?

So it seems teenagers prescribe to this creative brief. Their Instagram is like their bedroom - it represents their 'feel.'

"Like, if it doesn't go with the theme of their Instagram, people will either edit the crap out of it to make it fit or just won't post it," said Caitlin.

You need photos ofyou.

I'm the kind of 'grammer (that's what the cool kids say when they're talking about a person who uses Instagram) who likes to post pictures ofthings.

Excuse me, I went snorkelling and I saw Nemo. He was in his anemone!

My friends then comment things like 'you found Nemo!' and we laugh and laugh.

But I am NOT following therules.

"I find that photos of you tend to get more likes than a landscape photo, so a lot of people's Instagrams are just pictures of themselves," Caitlin explains.

This is Alexis Ren's Instagram feed:

Yeah, somehow I think I'd be posting a lot more pictures of me if I happened to look like that.

I'll stick to Nemo.

You need to watch your followers-to-following ratio.

According to Caitlin, the same goes for travel. "People make separate 'grams for travelling," she said. "Like a lot of mates doing gap years this year have a separate 'gram for travelling photos, which is good I reckon."

It sounds almost as though people are using separate Instagram accounts as 'galleries', with travel, health, and more everyday content needing to exist in different spaces.

Caitlin's descriptions let me inside a world I'm still far from understanding. And while it might seem trivial, and, of course, there's the side effect of me feeling like a complete loser after realising I follow approximately zero of the rules, it's important that we keep talking about how young people engage with social media and what it means to them.

After all, a platform they use for hours every day has to have some effect, and there's inevitably a great deal their interactions say about who they are and what their world looks like.

*Name was changed for anonymity.

Featured image: Alexis Ren/Instagram