Turning Plastic
It’s all a competition at the end of the day.
Apps like Instagram, SnapChat, Facebook and more are, for many teens, a form of self-expression. It can be a healthy medium, if applied correctly. The problem is that we’re doing it wrong.
Many teens tend to fuss about their appearance. While it can, in some contexts, represent a form of self-exploration as youth investigate a mature concept, it can also have to do with a form of competition.
It can be found on any movie poster: The Perfect Woman. She’s skinny as a rail, and pretty as can be. More often than not, she is… inadequately dressed, to say the least. Now, there are plenty of problems with this on its own, but this in combination with the new social media brews a rather troubling predicament.
Nowadays, people have ways of measuring beauty numerically. You just have to check the number of likes on a post.
That’s right: young girls can determine their worth by a number.
Now, it’s been this way for a while (the 2-inch waist, the ideal bust size, and, of course, the weight scale,) but never before has it been so easy for children to access these numerical values of self-worth. They just have to turn on their phone.
This leads to another problem: the world beyond the screen is not reality, but media-users treat it as such. The Guardian states that young adults ages 17–21 need to form a narcissistic complex in order to separate themselves from their parents. They go on to state that, quite obviously, the use of social media can have that narcissism become “unhealthily magnified.”
Courtesy of Mayo Clinic:
People with Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) can:
- Have an exaggerated sense of self-importance
- […]require constant, excessive admiration
- Expect to be recognized as superior even without achievements that warrant it
- Exaggerate achievements and talents
- Believe they are superior and can only associate with equally special people
- Be envious of others and believe others envy them
- Behave in an arrogant or haughty manner, coming across as conceited, boastful and pretentious
- Insist on having the best of everything — for instance, the best car or office
Does it not resemble social media butterflies? The desire for attention, for likes, followers, and comments, can cause people to warp their own identity.
Each account can be like a lottery: the chance of success can be hypnotizing. Humans in whole desire attention and praise, but in 2018, this desire can become overpowering. The epidemic of media users losing themselves in the world beyond the RGB can come to affect how they view others, and how they view themselves. The only thing worse than materialism is materialism over values that don’t exist.
