Being “Perfect” in Our Culture
My friends and I were talking the other day about social media affecting and becoming part of our culture. We discussed how people post their best moments or their best look on Instagram or Pinterest, but we never get to see who they really are. In a way these posts create our mindset on what’s “perfect” and how to become that.
In class we talked about how media can impact the way we look, which could potentially cause negative effects. When my friends and I talked, we said that the way women are represented in media and look “perfect” impacted the way we dressed, ate, exercised and looked. The overwhelming majority of our feeds are posts of selfies, rather that world issues. We came to the conclusion that these posts made us think we had to do certain things in order to fit into society.
Additionally in class we talked about the elements of culture, which I believe plays a role in our definition of “perfect.” The book defines culture as what human beings produce and the means by which we perserve what we have produced. It is constructed, mulitfaceted and uniquely human. However, there are three building blocks of culture, which are physical, social and attitudinal.
The physical aspect of culture is the artifacts. In our culture this would include items similar to make-up, fashion, music, shows, computers and phones. All of these human made products connect back to my main point of how society and our culture defines a so called perfect person in media. A “perfect” person wears the best clothes, has great taste in music, has the newest phone or computer, owns a cool car and wears the best make-up. This brings us to the second building block, social. These artifacts that make people look cool and pretty become a trend. Girls start comparing themselves to other girls and guys compare their stuff to other guys. Its a never ending cycle of who has the best product or who looks the best and fitting into society. These customs to which we adapt help us understand the world we live in. This is the final block, known as attitudinal, which continues the futuristic society example. For example, the future generation will look back at our artifacts now and critique them, just how we look back at the 80s or 90s and made our own generation new and different. We don’t want the future generation to look at us and say, “ Was being perfect and materilistic all that mattered?” It’s really fun showing off new haircuts, workouts, that trip you just took; however, its important knowledge whats behind the rose-colored glasses. We could shift the focus of social media from ourselves to a platform that talks about issues in the world and raises awareness for something you’re passionate about. Maybe if we collectively made this cultural change, we could become better role models for future generations.
