So obsessed have we become with digital recognition and the accompanying prestige that people are reportedly paying up to $15,000 on a strange kind of black market to have their Instagram accounts verified.

For the uninitiated, that means that people are shelling out more than a third of the average UK annual salary for the honour of having the social media platform place a small tick next to their names on their profiles, denoting them as people of particular public interest.

The sought-after swoosh - already a familiar feature on Twitter and Facebook - apparently grants users a prime spot in search results and gives them access to some special features on the photo-sharing site. But most importantly to many, it serves as a supreme status symbol – a magnet for followers, which in turn have quickly emerged as the common currency of popularity.

To me, the whole practice looks like a twisted, digital adaptation of a sort of obscure cash-for-honours affair, but arguably with so much more at stake: a whole generation’s sanity.

11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Show all 11 1 /11 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Hide and reorder filters Filters are a core part of Instagram, but there are so many available it can be easy to get lost. You can change the order in which they appear, and even hide the ones you never use, to speed up your photo-sharing process. On the filters page, scroll to the end, tap Manage, then drag and drop the ones you want to reorder, and un-check the ones you want to hide. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Never miss a post Instagram controversially ditched its reverse-chronological order feed for a new order determined by an algorithm, making it easy to completely miss some posts. To make sure you never miss a certain somebody’s updates, you can set up notification for them by visiting their profile, tapping the three dots in the top right-hand corner and selecting Turn On Post Notifications. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Eat less data If you’re worried about how much of your mobile data Instagram saps, you can limit it by sacrificing the speed at which the photos and videos in your feed load. Go to your profile, tap the three dots in the top right corner, open Cellular Data Use and choose Use Less Data. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed See your Likes It’s easy to lose track of your friends’ old posts on Instagram, but if you know you Liked it, you’ll be able to track it down easily. Just go to your profile, hit the three dots at the top and select Posts You’ve Liked. You can also save posts in a folder only you can see by tapping the bookmark icon underneath it. Take a look at everything you’ve bookmarked by tapping the same icon that sits near the top of your profile. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Find relevant hashtags Everyone knows you can expand the reach of your posts by using a number of relevant hashtags, but what those are aren’t always glaringly obvious. You can easily find the right ones for you by typing a keyword into Instagram’s search bar, selecting a hashtag from the list and swiping along the Related row that appears at the top of the screen. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Clear your search history Whatever your reasons are, you can clear your recent searches by going to your profile, hitting the three dots in the top right and selecting Clear Search History. To go a step further and hide your Suggested searches too, go to the search page, tap and hold the account you want to hide, and choose Hide from the pop-up window. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Hide photos you’re tagged in Tagged photos on Instagram aren’t as prominent as they are on Facebook, but anyone can still browse through other people’s pictures of you by visiting your profile and tapping the photo of you icon. If you’re tagged in a picture you don’t want other people to see, go to your profile, hit the photos of you icon, tap the three dots at the top of the screen and choose Hide Photos. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Secure your account Make your Instagram account much harder to hack by enabling two-factor authentication, a security feature that protects you even if your login details are stolen. Go to your profile, tap the three dots, open Two-Factor Authentication and toggle it on. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Share lots at once If you want to upload a bunch of related pictures and videos without flooding everyone else’s feed, you can shared them all as one post. Hit the + icon, select Gallery, choose Select Multiple, pick out up to 10 of the pictures and clips you want, tap Next and reorder them by dragging and dropping. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Record hands-free Instagram Stories has been a massive hit since it came out last year, but you might not know that you can record Stories clips without having to hold one of your digits on the record key. On the Stores screen, just swipe through the options at the bottom until you get to Hands-Free. 11 useful Instagram features you didn't know existed Edit posts after publishing Most people know you can delete any of the images you’ve already posted, but not everyone is aware that you can also edit them. Instagram unfortunately doesn’t let you tinker with filters and effects, but you can change your original caption, tag people and update the location.

The news is symptomatic of how far our preoccupation with online influencers and overnight celebrities has become. That preoccupation threatens to teach our children that anything you do in life is basically irrelevant, unless it happens on the web. And it elevates the importance of our cyber-existence above the lives we lead offline.

I’m useless at keeping up to date with TV or film. I discovered the joys of Netflix embarrassingly recently, so it was only a few weeks ago that I watched an episode from the third season of the dystopian sci-fi series Black Mirror. “Nosedive” tells the tale of Lacie, a young woman who becomes so fixated on how highly her friends and acquaintances rate her on social media that she completely loses the plot, drunkenly crashes her best friend’s wedding and ends up in jail hurling obscenities at a fellow inmate before the credits start to roll.

The story is in equal parts entertaining and terrifying, precisely because it doesn’t actually veer as far from reality as it’s perhaps designed to do. Already social media has transformed a generation of young people into image-obsessed perfectionists, many of whom are enslaved by self-criticism and a belief that they are only worth as much as their likes, comments and retweets.

The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous Show all 8 1 /8 The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous The ocean, seen here in Mexico, is good for teture, says Clarke Tommy Clarke The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous Clarke's photos show a different side of beach life Tommy Clarke The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous Yachts in the Med off the Cote d'Azur Tommy Clarke The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous The yachts take pride of place on these flipflops (£9.50) The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous A harbour in the Cote d'Azur Tommy Clarke The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous Cornwall's Carbis Bay looks positively Caribbean-like in this picture Tommy Clarke The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous The Carbis Bay shot appears on these M&S swimming trunks M&S The Instagram pics that made Tommy Clarke famous Go easy on the Instagram filters, says Clarke - the world is spectacular enough as it is Tommy Clarke

Round-the-clock exposure to pictures and posts of beautiful, successful, wealthy and worldly people is supercharging our insecurities more than we might realise. Several studies claim to have proven the positive effects the internet has on our long-term mental health (as a result of it being a tool to create and foster relationships) but numerous others have demonstrated the opposite.

Time spent surfing the web has been associated with an increase in depressive symptoms. A study by the University of Missouri-Columbia has demonstrated that using Facebook can lead to depression if feelings of envy are triggered.

The sprawling nature of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and their ilk means that any attempt to police the social media universe would amount to nothing more than a waste of energy and money. But that’s no excuse to let this problem swell and linger.

Here in the UK, the Advertising Standards Authority already does a decent job of cracking down on public campaigns that offend, upset, mislead or disturb. Extending their influence to personal accounts would be unreasonable, not to mention impossible (imagine banning a photograph for making someone look too toned or too tanned – or censoring a snapshot of a Caribbean beach because it might distress someone sitting in an office in rainy Slough).

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But what we can do is educate.

We need classes on the national curriculum to teach people what virtual reality is, and to make people familiar with the deceptions and shams that it facilitates – both trivial and vital.