Okay, so over the last few blog posts Instasham have been discussing how to fight against the way Instagram affects our self-esteem. But what makes it more damaging than any other social network?
Comparison Theory
In psychology, Social Comparison Theory argues that people evaluate their own abilities and opinions by comparing themselves to others, and to cultural ideals. Research has shown that by comparing your own appearance to the unrealistic ideals shown by models in magazines, you will often negatively evaluate your own attractiveness due to an upward social comparison. This is when the image you are comparing yourself to is “better” than you.
Why is Instagram worse?
It is natural for us to compare ourselves to others. We do it all the time. Even in Primary School we would compare who had the better school shoes. Or who had the nicer sandwiches in the lunch hall. Or who got the best mark in the spelling test.
But social networks have increased our access to each others’ lives and so we are able to make more comparisons than ever before. On Facebook it’s only really our friends and family who we connect with. Instagram, however, lets you follow celebrities, models, public figures and basically anyone you want to. This means we have access to the lives of people with more money and popularity. We are suddenly able to compare ourselves to people with access to things that we can only dream of having.
Regularly comparing to celebrities and those who have more of society’s ‘ideals’ could have a hugely negative effect on an your self-esteem and body image. More upward social comparisons cause more negative evaluations of yourself. This in turn leads to more possibility of low self-esteem and poor body image.
The fact that Instagram is all about photos is also a huge factor in this. Twitter allows you to follow celebrities too, but there aren’t as many visuals to work with. We don’t have an image of a slim, toned, tanned body in a bikini in Mauritius to compare ourselves too (how is that body even possible?!).
We are visual creatures. When was the last time you read a tweet and compared yourself to it? If you think about it, there are very few times we compare ourselves to text. But we almost immediately compare ourselves to photos. Having a visual in front of you sets up the opportunity to compare. Words just don’t really have the same effect…
Okay Kim, thanks for sharing…
With 600 million users, Instagram gives us a constant flow of images. A constant supply of “realities” to compare ourselves too. They aren’t just imagined scenarios, things we’ve pictured in our head – they are “real.” And we accept this and ask ourselves why it isn’t our reality. This is why it’s so bad. Even though we know about all the filters and editing tools available, we accept these images as real. Things people have actually seen or done. These are peoples’ achievements in life. And what have we achieved? That’s the exact process which makes Instagram possibly one of the biggest dangers to self-esteem in today’s society.
Filters
This is something I’ve mentioned quite a lot but it’s a huge factor in what makes Instagram so bad for our self-esteem. The process of posting a selfie can take hours. First you take 20+ photos, then you have to decide which one is the best and that alone can take forever. Next comes the editing. In one app you’ll change the brightness, saturation, and anything else you think needs improving. Then save. Then open in another app where you can give yourself better eyelashes. Finally you take it into Instagram and make those final adjustments; you might even add a filter, save, then add another filter on top. The end result? A “no make-up day” selfie. Right.
The last few years saw magazines face huge backlash for printing photoshopped images and people made it clear they didn’t want to see that. We wanted to see plus-size models and some eye bags. Having women embrace their beauty and begin to put their foot down when it came to these airbrushed images was amazing. But at the same time we’re accepting these heavily edited posts on Instagram and asking ourselves why we don’t look like them – how does that work?
Young girls today are growing up thinking that to look good and get likes they need to use multiple apps and layer several filters. This just isn’t okay. Making filters the norm is potentially a very dangerous thing when it comes to self-esteem. None of these girls will have a good body image if they think they need the Valencia filter to look good.
The monster that is Instagram is a very real danger to our self-esteem and body image. This is why we need to raise awareness of the fakeness of the posts we see.
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