Agent of change blog post

Posted by Fionn Hyland on Friday, May 18, 2018 at 10:07 pm

I have worked hard in trying to help fix the problem of social media and body image. I researched and wrote an essay about my research. In my research I found some shocking things about eating disorders and what magazines do to make there models look good. Then I did some of my own research, I watched this documentary called Straight/curve Redefining body image and I interviewed the creator of the documentary. I thought that it was eye opening to see how kids are influenced today and what the media can do.

Throughout my research I found only a few organizations that were helping to fix this problem. People are not just having fundraisers, I also saw tha some organizations were having ted talks. I watched one of the ted talks and it was wonderful, the person speaking talked about her own experiences and what she went through as a kid. She talked about loving to swim when she was younger just not loving the way her body looked in the swim suit. I also found this new organization that is dedicated to help people with eating disorders and people with body image issues in general. I believe that these are good ways to start change and that maybe there are other ways. I do think that having a ted talk was a good idea. I believe that this is affecting the kids the most and that if it is a video it is going to be on the internet so kids are bound to find it. So a ted talk is a good way to get the word out to the kids.

For my agent of change I decided to pick four magazines and write four different letters to the editors of the magazines. I decided to write letters to Teen vogue, Allure, Seventeen, and GQ. In these letters I wanted to talk about what I thought was a good way to show body image and what I thought they could have done better with. I decided to do this because I thought that is would be a good way to get the word out. I decided that instead of doing something big I could target four magazines. I thought this would make an impact on the problem. My experience was a good one while writing the letters I tried to look at the magazines closely and see what really needed to be changed and what I thought was something they needed to be complimented on. I was not that effective in making a change when I sent the letters out I only got one response.

GQ is a men’s magazine and I picked that magazine because I do not think that men and body image are talked enough about. Through all my research I saw nothing about men and body image and it just shows that people associate body image problems with girls when sometimes that is not the case. While I was looking through the magazines I only had good things to say about the GQ. This was the only letter I wrote that had all good things. The whole magazine was diverse and had a different range of models. Some models were plus sized and some were not most of the models ranged from different ages. I really enjoyed looking through there magazine and seeing the diversity between models.

I felt really good about doing this project I liked picking a problem and trying to help to fix the problem. While researching this problem I read some articles that discussed what some people say about themselves and I noticed that I do this all the time. I judge myself on the way I look. I feel like I could have picked a better thing to do for my agent of change. I thought that what I did was good I just was upset about the outcome. There is plenty left for others to do to help improve this problem. Over all I am glad I decided to work on this issue.

Link to letters:

Link to Annotated bibliography

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