Anna Benson
http://www.elle.com/culture/news/a31635/essena-oneill-instagram-social-media-is-not-real-life/
Above is a link to an article/video about social media and the negativity that it brings into peoples lives, especially young women. Essena O'Neill is a 19 year old Australian girl and formerly "insta famous" with more than 500,000 instagram followers. She amassed this following with "fitspo" pictures along with some selfies and style pictures. Essena reveals that her social media life is a completely fake world with entirely staged and edited pictures. Essena admits to not eating all day so 50 pictures could be taken of her at the beach with the perfect flat stomach and thigh gap as well as being paid hundreds of dollars per post to advertise products such as clothing and detox tea. Her experience is a phenomenon at the moment in social networking. It seems like every new page you click on is a girl who has thousands or even millions of followers and the only things she posts are pictures of her bikini bod or pictures of her new purse or jet setting expedition.
These accounts really are detrimental to young girls and women around the world. They plant the seed of inferiority in our minds : "she is so skinny wow I'm not eating today" "I would die for her wardrobe" and other equally harsh thoughts can often times be hard to quiet when you are perusing through the orchestrated life of someone society deems essentially physically perfect. All of these accounts for the most part show fiction: a post paid for by a company for a girl to wear on social networking that makes other girls want it and in turn, they buy it. \
In the article, Essena states that about a month ago she had enough with this fake world and all of the negativity it brought into her life and the lives of the girls who followed and envied her. She lifted the veil of "insta fame" and exposed the ugly truth about her struggles with eating disorders and inability to be present because she was so caught up in the fake social network world. She posted pictures of her without makeup and edited the caption of every previous picture stating what really was going on behind the scenes like "I got paid $500 to post this" or "I yelled at my little sister all morning in order to get the perfect picture where I liked how my stomach looked". These revelations to me are a breath of fresh air and I am curious as to whether or not other people feel the same way. I applaud Essena for exposing the truth behind this social networking fame; it's more or less a construct of companies that subsidize a couple hundred girls lives in order to make the masses buy things. Unfortunately, the young girls are the biggest victims of this with often times fragile self esteem and the horrendous media constantly trying to tell them what they should look like. In my opinion, the world needs more Essenas, more people to be truthful and helping build up girls, not tear them down.
Anna,
ReplyDeleteI completely agree. The pressure young women put on themselves to have the perfect picture for their profile social media and comparing and scrutinizing their bodies. When most of us are leafing through a magazine or on social media we know that the pictures have been altered in some way to appear perfect. The media only shows skinny and beautiful models that are touched up in order to disguise their flaws and to make the model appear to be skinner than they are. Young women are leaded to believe that is the way that the models look like in real life. I believe these unrealistically skinny images makes young women feel inadequate and they start to have feeling of depression. This feeling often times leads them to develop eating disorders like anorexia, bulimia and a low self esteem. I agree with you that the world does need more Essena O’Neil’s to expose the truth behind social networks. We all need to realize that we are all different, and none of us are perfect. We can feel better about our body image by living a healthy lifestyle and accepting the fact that most of the images on social media are not realistic in the real world.
I recently deleted my Instagram because I would find myself becoming envious of other people. I would see their post and think that they are living such a better life than me. I would then feel bad about myself. I also found myself paying more attention to my social Medias than to the world around me. I would not be engaged in conversations or even paying attention. I found myself out of touch with what was going on around me. It was really discouraging to me. If one of my post did not get that many likes then I would feel like I was not good enough. I would also look at my friends post and see that they were getting more likes than me. This would cause me to unnecessarily compare myself to them.
ReplyDeleteI think articles like this one are extremely important. It exposes what social media is doing to people’s confidence. I feel that people are becoming so engulfed in social media that they are forgetting to see the world around them for what it is. This article shows that what people are seeing is not real. There is no reason to be envious of what Essena O’Neill had. It shows the extremes she had to go to just for likes.
Reading this made me think of another "insta famous" person known as Dan Bilzerian. He is a professional poker player, actor, and social media personality. He posts pictures of his private jet, shooting enormous guns, or two naked girls in his bed. This guy seems like he is living the life. A life that just isn't real to a normal person and probably isn't even real for Dan. With 14 million followers, there is no doubt that some young males may look up to him, wanting to some day be him. A rich bachelor who is famous mostly for being a rich bachelor. Not only does he objectify women in his posts, but he distorts the idea of what a man should be. Summing up his manliness with luxury items, guns, and good looking girls, Dan is making everyone feel insecure in one way or another. Though I don't have any proof, I like to think that this guy is a phony as well. Using his abundance of poker money to pay girls to skinny dip in his hot tub just so he can take a picture for his instagram and claim that he slept with them to appear as a manly man.
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