Sex/uality Artifacts

In today’s world, social media is more prevalent than ever. Teens, college students, and even children wake up on an average day and the first thing they do is reach to their nightstand and grab their phone to check their Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook before getting out of bed. I’m guilty of this myself. Just this morning the first thing I did was check my twitter feed before forcing myself to get ready for class. Something we unconsciously do while looking through these social media sites is compare ourselves. People post the best parts of their lives on their timelines. As Brian Hanley writes in his article “Why Social Media Makes You Feel Ugly,” newsfeed people are perfect. Pictures are edited, stories fabricated, really our social media are our own personal life highlight reels. The myth that comes about through these highlight reels is that everyone else is doing better than us, or looks better than us. For example, as I’m walking to work after class I run into a friend and she stops me and says, “How are you and your girlfriend? You guys are seriously perfect!” as a result of me posting a professional picture that we had taken a few weeks back. Despite the fact that I have conflict within my relationship just as much as everyone else does, a picture of us smiling with some great editing tells a different story. The perception that everyone else has it ‘perfect’ is what causes us to feel ugly ourselves. Brian Hanley uses the Kardashian family as an example of the fact that someone else always has it better. On Instagram, Kendall Jenner has 35.6 million followers, which for the average person seems like a lot, and would lead you to believe that Kendall would be happy about that. But, sister Kim Kardashian has 45.7 million followers, and yet even Kim doesn’t have the most Instagram followers. Taylor Swift has over 300,000 more followers than Kim. Moral of the story, somebody else will always look better, have more followers, get more likes, etc. What we need to remember is that just because someone looks like they have it all on Instagram, they are just as human as the rest of us.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/brian-hanley/social-media-makes-you-feel-ugly_b_8124006.html