Selfies and the value of self expression: instead of copycats and adhering to society
The simple mantra that everyone goes through often starts off like this. Take out the camera and hold it at an arm’s length, angling the phone to get the best shot. Position your face, experiment with different poses and hand signs, then snap away! There you have the humble selfie. But from that point, the mantra becomes a little more complex. Of the 50 shots taken, you delete 49, which appears amazing at first, but upon further examination, you spot tiny flaws like creases. Or the unflattering background. You switch locations, dab on a little makeup and repeat the whole process. But it doesn’t stop there. You want your selfie to stand out on a feed or timeline full of such photos. One that would make people scroll back and take a second look. So, you start testing out different
…show more content…
They spends hours poring over makeup tutorials online or training their body to hide flab. All to ensure that they paint an attractive online self-portrait of themselves, a false image.
Kim Kardashian, known far and wide as the Queen of Selfies, gave casual tips during talk shows about taking selfies, tips taken seriously by her army of ardent fans. Fans of celebrities often emulate and copy selfies of stupid things done by their idols out of blind idolism. For example, Kylie Jenner posted a selfie of her lips in a shots glass, claiming it to be the beauty secret to her full, pouty lips. Blindly following her without thinking clearly, some of the shot glasses exploded on their mouths, making them far worse than originally.
Value of self-expression is steadily declining in union with declining self-esteem, shown by models’ pictureseq photos, causing the average ordinary teenager to feel unspecial and unworthy of attention
There you are holding your camera an arm’s length away from your face, posing in the most flattering position to capture your best angle. There you are taking a photo of yourself to share with all of your Facebook friends. Taking a self-portrait photo, also known as a selfie, is something almost everyone has done in this new generation. This action is typically done without a second thought. In Alex Williams’ article “Here I Am Taking My Own Picture” that second thought is provoked through exploring the quickly spreading trend of self-portrait photography. In the article while Williams’ provides interesting examples on a changing generation as this trend progresses through social media and modern technology; Williams also leaves something to be desired within the article due to a lack of direction in the author’s stance on the topic.
In the article “What Your Selfies Say About You” by Peggy Drexler, she talks about self-portraits also known as the “selfie”, and how it has taken over social media and added a manifestation to society’s obsession with looks. Taking a self-portrait can be positive in the sense that you are proud of your image and are not scared to share it with others helping boost up your self-esteem. Although this may help others by persuading them to not be ashamed to share their true image, Drexler believes this can also affect other individuals whose focus is only on looks making them feel self-conscious about their looks. A recent study out of the UK found that the selfie phenomenon may be damaging to real world relationships, concluding that both excessive
“According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders, about 70 percent of girls grades five through 12 said magazine images influence their ideals of a perfect body, a fact that’s plain to see in the online world of teenage ‘thinspiration’” (Krupnick 1). This quote explains that girls in grades five to 12 are more likely to have a lower self esteem because of the idea of a perfect body beinging spread through social media. Models enjoy sharing their work with their fans their instagram and twitter accounts, which isn’t wrong. However, sometimes the pictures they post are exposed subtly, this causes for the pictures to get under someone's skin before they notice. These models, like Kylie and Kendall Jenner and Gigi Hadid, are idealized but billions of people and have millions of followers on social media but all they do is post pictures of them living the luxury life that everyone watches. These posts could either help influence teens to work harder or cause them to try to achieve what they want in a harmful way. Having weight and height limits will lower the self esteem of others because they put out an image that most people think they must look
To begin, social media has created unrealistic standards for young people, especially females. Being bombarded by pictures of females wearing bikinis or minimal clothing that exemplifies their “perfect” bodies, squatting an unimaginable amount of weight at a gym while being gawked at by the opposite sex or of supermodels posing with some of life’s most desirable things has created a standard that many young people feel they need to live up to. If this standard isn’t reached, then it is assumed that they themselves are not living up to the norms or the “standards” and then therefore, they are not beautiful. The article Culture, Beauty and Therapeutic Alliance discusses the way in which females are bombarded with media messages star...
Nevertheless, the girl screeching in horror of her own reflection is not the only teen, who talks about, each and everything they despise about themselves. Furthermore, this girl relates to Charlotte, in the book Girl In Pieces, which is about a young 17-year old girl that was so insecure that the cuts that were imprinted on her wrist, she was determined to hide them. She made such an effort to look somewhat normal that she had to wear long-sleeves even when it was scorching hot outside. She was so insecure about herself, which caused her to suffer on the inside. This is the problem, teens suffering because of their insecurities.
Airbrushed models and teen superstars are only two of the types of influences on teens. The signal that is given is "Thin is in." Regrettably, these superstars project an image of perfection that is, consequently, unattainable and unrealistic. What teens see on the T.V. may shape their view of reality. T.V. produces images like Paris Hilton. She is skinny, sexy, attractive, and she fits into the smallest size of all the number one fashions. She may act as if she loves the delicious taste of home cooked meals like juicy sweet barbeque ribs on her television show "Simple life", but behind the scenes she was probably throwing it all up. The media knows that young girls dream of becoming just like her, but still they will try to make her look even skinner. What young a girl like Sherie does not see is what it takes to makes a great picture. The making of an impressive picture is usually done on a computer, they smooth the face out for a great complexion, add a smaller waist, and erase any "imperfections" they feel may exist
Throughout history, the female form has always been a prevalent source of artistic muse. The introduction of the modern photographic camera allowed the objectification of women to increase exponentially. In today’s society, women of all ages struggle to exemplify what is perceived as the ideal female form. Studies show that women – beginning in their mid-teen years – experience a steady degeneration of self-esteem relative to the level of dissatisfaction with their internal body image. The decline of self-image in women can be directly linked to several contributing factors including: film and print advertising, social media, and the early exposure of adolescent girls to overly-sexualized products and media.
“Selfies are not all about seeking external validation” (Rutledge). Selfies are generally understood as a form of self-portraiture in which the photographer is also the main subject or, one of, the photograph. Selfies have become a more prominent trend since “[…] appear[ing] on the photo-sharing site Flickr and on MySpace back in 2004” (Rutledge). However, desire for self-portraiture has existed since first commissioned in Ancient Egypt, self-painted since the invention of the mirror, and now simplified and cost-free with digital camera devices (Rutledge). As a result, the now widespread selfie has created a negative stigma that nearly makes them synonymous with narcissism, though such immediate reasoning
The media shows women that represent beauty, even if these women are not real. This means the women in magazines that teenagers wish to look like is not authentic. Many teenagers don’t understand the difference of what is real and fake. So, they believe that the ave...
Not only are young girls wishing to be thinner, their self-confidence is being demolished by the media. “In one recent study, researchers found that TV programs focused on appearance are swaying the self-esteem of girls as young as 5” (Heubeck).... ... middle of paper ... ...
In addition to planting false hopes in the minds of easily persuaded young girls, this appalling view of “beauty” now booming in western cultures is shockingly leading to high rates of low self-esteem and eating disorders. In a National Report on the State of Self-Esteem issued by the Dove Self-Esteem Fund (June 2008), it was reported that a self-esteem crisis is prevalent in the Uni...
People use selfies for releasing their desire of narcissism. It appears snapping the perfect photo has become more important than truly enjoying memorable moments in life; which could be the reason narcissism has risen with the popularity of social media. The search giant, which uses machine learning software to add labels to images uploaded to its Google Photos application, analyzed how many of those were selfies. More than 200 million people upload images to the application each month. A staggering 24 billion selfies were uploaded to Google's Photos application in the past year. A blog post by Google Blog the author said, “A year ago, we introduced Google Photos with one mission – to be a home for all your photos and videos organized and brought to life so that you can share and save what matters.” “You've collectively freed up 13.7 petabytes of storage on your devices – it would take 424 years to swipe through that many photos.” “We've also applied two trillion labels, and 24 billion of those have been for selfies.” Yet this is only likely to be a fraction of the true number of self-portraits snapped by smartphone users in 2015 – Google only counted images uploaded to its Photos app. It will not include selfies kept on Apple's iCloud, posted to Facebook, Snapchat, Twitter and
Ever since selfies started trending, this generation started caring only about how their pictures turned out. People nowadays stop everything they may be doing to capture the perfect selfie. Selfie sticks were also recently created to add more to this silly picture. After this trend, many apps came out to edit and perfect ones selfie. Eventually, these apps may lead to over editing and maybe even towards younger people. Teens stop focusing on school work and more on how to keep their online audience entertained. In fact, it has become sort of a competition to see who has the lost Instagram followers or likes on our selfies.
These followers could consist of family, actual friends, coworkers, or even strangers. Posing, filtering, and editing are all forms of self-promotion and self-presentation of a person in a socially desirable image. In the article “What does your selfie say about you?” researchers believe that unlike other forms of photography, the selfies “do not reflect [a person’s] actual personality” (Qiu et al., 444). If a photo is a live capture of oneself, how is this possible?
...twelve actors at the oscars awards was the worlds most rewetted photograph in the world, with stars like Meryl Streep, Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita Nyong’o and Brad Pitt, received more than 921,000 retweets in less than 40 minutes[__]. It went on to get more than two million retweets by the end of the ceremony, now with 3.4 million [__] and still counting. Not only dose this show the power of social networks, it also shows the craze of the phenomenon of the selfie. The nature of traditional portraiture is to capture something enduring about the person, the essence of the subject. The selfie is very different, it's about capturing the nature of a moment. They are not meant to last, to linger in the memory in the same way.