Is social media the issue

In my previous post titled “Why beauty standards are stupid” I talked about my research about toxic beauty standards and how they affect people everyday. More recently I conducted interviews with fellow classmates asking them more personal questions about how beauty standards affect them. In this post I will be talking about my experiences with my research, interviews, and overall how this project affected me and how I plan to bring change to the world. One of the biggest challenges about my topic is beauty standards are something that are ingrained so deeply in our society. Specifically something I feel our society almost revolves around, social media. For many people, especially people my age and a little older social media is a big part of our lives. Sometimes it is the first thing you check when you wake up, and the last thing you check before you go to bed. But social media is toxic. And when something you spend so much time on is toxic, bad things happen. In my last post I talked about how toxic beauty standards are often pushed onto people on social media platforms like instagram and tik tok. A term I have used in my previous post is “The perfect lifestyle.” And what I mean by that is on social media platforms so called instagram models will post about their perfect body, and perfect lifestyle. Which often negatively affects the people viewing it. Teenagers are especially affected by this because they will look at one of these posts and wonder why their body or life doesn’t look like the so-called perfection on their screen. When conducting my interviews I asked two of my classmates whether or not they feel beauty standards would exist without social media, both had very different answers to this. Aylin Echandy stated that she thinks beauty standards wouldn’t be as “Big or impactful” without social media. While Caleb Park said “Yes, beauty standards have existed since the beginning of written history.” Both of these answers made a lot of sense to me and believe that they both have a lot of truth to them. After conducting my own research I learned that beauty standards have been around forever, but have they always been toxic? Or was social media the thing that made them that way? For my actual agent of change I did two things. The first one I have already talked about a little bit. I conducted interviews with a couple of classmates and out of those interviews made a podcast. The second thing, shown down below is a piece of artwork I created. View my podcast here

The artwork I created for my project.

I used quotes from my interviews and then at the bottom asked the question I have been asking myself throughout this process, is social media the problem? I then drew a picture which I think captures the way beauty standards can make people feel. The podcast was my first idea. I thought that interviews were a really solid way to conduct research on people who have had a first hand experience with beauty standards and social media. I also thought that making a podcast could be a really cool way to show others how people, just like them, feel about this issue. Actually conducting these interviews and making the podcast were much harder than I originally thought. I had to identify people to interview, set up time that worked for both of us, conduct the actual interview and then edit it into a podcast. I had originally planned to interview 4 or 5 people. But only ended up being able to do two interviews. After all of this I still question whether or not I actually made or am making a change. Will people listen to my podcast and feel moved? Will people relate to my visual? Is that what change is? In the end I like to think I made a change. I hope the people I interviewed, and the people who listen to my podcast, reflect on my questions and feel better about themselves because of it. I really hope that I made a change, even if it’s a small one. Annotated bibliography