How have beauty standards on social media advocated peer pressure?

Anna dang, marketing director

 Exploring the relationship between body image perception and social media

Social media is growing more rapidly and pervasively across the world (Liu, 295). In the same way, the proliferation of media usage for support, entertainment and connection has made it become a crucial part of our life (Liu, 301). However, a meta-analysis of Qian Huang found that there are harms associated with social media use in terms of body dissatisfaction and self-objectification, which are considered problematic digital issues for teenagers, especially girls.

Body image is a multidimensional construct that refers to one's perception of and attitudes about the size and shape of one's body, wrote Martha Peaslee Levine in Perception of Beauty. The term contains a perceptual component that refers to the way we see our body size, shape, weight, physical characteristics and movement, and how these attributes affect our feelings and behaviours in life.

With the rise of visual culture, which implies the interdisciplinary expression of visual images, social media has become more attractive with new digital editing techniques that also contributes to the popularity of the "selfie" on different platforms (Glazzard and Stones 2019). However, the emergence of this new media negatively influences individuals’ self-representation by informing and reflecting what people consider to be beautiful, which creates a new idea of beauty standards.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A MIRROR

"Young women are exploited, manipulated and seduced into hating themselves as a way to generate astronomical profits that keep very few, very wealthy." - The Illusionist 2015.

Attention economy is defined as the system in a media-saturated and information-rich world where the labourers are presented as "subject of value". According to a poll released in 2019, some 54 percent of North Americans between the ages of thirteen and thirty-eight would (if given the chance) become a social-media influencer.

Body image that circulates in the attention economy incorporates the common use of thin and attractive models on social media platforms, which causes pressure on self-representation. It is adequately explained by the idea of social comparison theory developed by Leon Festinger in 1954, illustrating a drive within individuals to look to outside images in order to evaluate their own opinions and abilities.

Using social media as a mirror, teenage girls are comparing themselves with a desire to become the representations that appear in different shape ideals, hair, skin, and facial features. The significant amount of time spent online is significantly related to the internalisation of the body dissatisfaction and self-objectification (Levine, 2017). While approximately 90% of teenage girls are unhappy with their body, this discontent strongly relates to the frequency of new photographs on several networked social media accounts every hour that put teenagers into an appearance-based comparison (Glazzard and Stones, 2019).

These numbers are terrifying, so let's have a deeper thought, shall we?


Knowing the effects

The pressure can burden anyone.

Body image is significant for many young people, both male and female, but particularly females in their teens and early twenties (Perloff 363). In fact, many pieces of literature and academic sources illustrate that young girls are more affected by social media and unrealistic beauty (Fardouly and Vartanian, 2016). However, boys can also suffer from a considerable amount of pressure with the desire to portray themselves in ideal appearances in the digital attention economy (Fardouly and Vartanian 2016).

Both girls’ and boys’ cases are concerning, as it generates self-objectification and body dissatisfaction regarding social comparison, which are important predictors of disordered eating, anxiety, and depression.

1. Mental health issues:

The metaphor of negative feelings due to comparison with ideal models on social media is elicited in mental health issues such as anxiety and depression (Huang et al.). In the attention economy, Instagram users are exploiting beauty apps to promote self-branding values and societal ideals, which results in media users who judge and compare themselves to be less attractive than what they observe. In fact, as media tools mediate how we understand and perceive cultures (Liu, 290), exposure to more appearance-related content contributes to greater body dissatisfaction and self-objectification along with cognitive outcomes in negative feelings for ourselves.

2. Eating disorders:

Long-term suffering from mental health issues leads to severe eating disorders, which is considered as a driver for thinness and muscularity (Fardouly and Vartanian 2016). Individuals’ degree of eating concerns has been proved to be significantly related to high engagement with social media usage (Perloff 365). Getting caught in the pressure to conform to beauty standards on social media through filters and selection in branding, teenagers develop self-hating thoughts for being too fat. This leads to the stress of wanting to become thin quickly by setting unscientific eating habits. For example, with a perception of being overweight, some teenagers skip their breakfast to reduce the meals in one day, which results in malnutrition (Kim, 115). Altogether, the eating symptom is becoming more prevalent in young people while living in a visual culture with the advent of modern technologies (Rodgers 95).

Each of us is born with amazing features and we have the rights and privileges to make ourselves become the version of who we want to be. Why should we have to compare with someone else, even when the comparison would not improve our core values?

Regardless of the fact that the unrealistic beauty now does exist with the support of Photoshop and modern editing technologies (Rodgers, 98), there is no true beauty, I assume, because each of us is an independent individual and we are beautiful in different ways.


Futures of media - A manipulative world

With the current outsized growth in digital media consumption, media has become a world with full power to manipulate human behaviour. Not just serving for delivering news, media production is skewed to user-generated content for entertainment and business purposes.


In the future, I can be someone who works in the media industry with professionalism. However, instead of denying it, I want to accept the fact that I cannot change the negative things and consequences in this saturated-media world by myself, although I have always been eager to make it happen. Analysing the topic of beauty standards on social media, I recognized that the career path of a media scholar would require alignment in the study and career choices to investigate and propose a purposeful solution. From the idea of providing different perspectives of body dissatisfaction and self-objectification, I observe that the required knowledge even covers psychology and economics with a focus on media communication to understand the problem thoroughly. Not everyone is a media scholar, so my career also puts an emphasis in delivering quality to other people who are passively affected by new forms of media.


Thinking about this on the societal scale, everyone should be acknowledged for becoming  more responsible media users and being more critical. According to the study of David Buckingham, by using the established framework of ‘key concepts’ (representation, language, production, audience), digital literacy needs to be considered as part of a broader reconceptualisation of literacy, and of the use of technology in education. As there are different approaches in digital literacy while modern technology continues to exist between and within societies, being critical in the context of media means understanding the relationship between reality and representation (images, language,..) (Buckingham, 2007 pp.48). Thus, it is imperative we become more aware of the position of a user and communication process.


REFERENCES:

Huang, Qian, et al. “When Media Become the Mirror: A Meta-Analysis on Media and Body Image.” Media Psychology, vol. 24, no. 4, 2020, pp. 437–489., doi:10.1080/15213269.2020.1737545.

Liu, Shuang, et al. Introducing intercultural communication: global cultures and contexts. Sage Publications, 2019. Monash Library, pp. 290-313.

Thumim, N. Self-Representation and Digital Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Glazzard, Jonathan, and Samuel Stones. “Body Image and Mental Health.” Leeds Beckett University, Carnegie Education, 13 May 2019, www.leedsbeckett.ac.uk/blogs/carnegie-education/2019/05/body-image-and-mental-health/.

Levine, Martha Peaslee “Chapter8: Beauty, Body Image, and the Media.” Perception of Beauty, InTech, 2017, pp. 145–157.

Swanson, Barrett. “[Letter from Los Angeles] the Anxiety of Influencers, by Barrett Swanson.” Harper's Magazine, 2021, harpers.org/archive/2021/06/tiktok-house-collab-house-the-anxiety-of-influencers/.

Fardouly, Jasmine, and Lenny R. Vartanian. “Social Media and Body Image Concerns: Current Research and Future Directions.” Current Opinion in Psychology, vol. 9, 2016, pp. 1–5., doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.09.005.

Perloff, Richard M. “Social Media Effects on Young Women’s Body Image Concerns: Theoretical Perspectives and an Agenda for Research.” Sex Roles, vol. 71, no. 11-12, 2014, pp. 363–377., doi:10.1007/s11199-014-0384-6.

Kim, Ji Won, and T. Makana Chock. “Body Image 2.0: Associations between Social Grooming on Facebook and Body Image Concerns.” Computers in Human Behavior, vol. 48, 2015, pp. 114-125., doi:10.1016/j.chb.2015.01.009.

Rodgers, R.F., Melioli, T. The Relationship Between Body Image Concerns, Eating Disorders and Internet Use, Part I: A Review of Empirical Support. Adolescent Res Rev 1, 95–119 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40894-015-0016-6.


Buckingham, David. “Digital Media Literacies: Rethinking Media Education in the Age of the Internet.” Research in Comparative and International Education, vol. 2, no. 1, Mar. 2007, pp. 43–55, doi:10.2304/rcie.2007.2.1.43.