How Social Media Is A Toxic Mirror Analysis

he media has a profound effect on the perception of our bodies, mainly woman. In “How Social Media Is a Toxic Mirror” (Rachel Simmons, TIMES magazine, 2016) she speaks about today's generation and the effects of social media in our lives.Rachel Simmons states “psychologist found robust cross-cultural evidence linking social media use to body image concerns, dieting, body surveillance, a drive for thinness and self objectification in adolescents.” As a millennial myself growing up with some sort of access to the Internet, it is not just in adolescents and teens it’s affecting. Social media plays a huge role in everyone from teens to even others as old as 50. We sometimes don’t even realize it but we are seeing less kids outside playing and
When did our world become so secluded from what is going on and how corrupt we have all become due to social media that we have completely eliminated all face to face interaction and no longer have a shoebox full of polaroids and the pictures we do lack longer look like our true selves with all the photoshop and makeup we feel we have to layer on our face because of a youtube video. My question is, Why do you want to look like something you’re not? In How Social Media Is a toxic Mirror, she speaks about Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram which are the major platforms for communication with others from all over the globe calling them illusions and I couldn’t agree more. Facebook, Snapchat, and Instagram are just illusions, you can change your eye color, your weight, pigment, and complexion so when you do share that selfie, you no longer look like you. What we are not paying close attention to is the negative effects of social media and the invisible damage it’s causing which I personally find more troubling than changing my eye
The Urban Institutes of study on bullying showed 17% of students reported being victims of cyberbullying with statistics gathered from Cyber Bullying statistics | 2014 it shows that 69% of teens own their own computer, cell telephone and use social media, 42% of youth report being bullied online and 20% of teens that are cyber bullied think about suicide. That is, out of 100 teens 20 of them have thought about suicide due to cyberbullying. In 2013 there was 1748 deaths among teens aged 15 to 19 years old death determined suicide due to cyber bullying accorinding to one website (TeenSafe). With social media being a competition, as well as every detail about our lives being completely public, others become mean when they see someone with “more likes” and will begin harassing, name calling, body shaming, as far as even threatening to cause harm to one another, causing people to feel like they are nothing, on the other hand suicide is not necessarily is not caused by cyberbullying but the cyberbullying that is amplifying their own feelings and thoughts to where they are convinced they are nothing and sadly end up taking their own lives so they no longer have to feel that pain. Social media and other platforms are only monitored during the enrollment process, after you are signed up on the website, there is nobody watching whats going on there is not some big fancy building with internet police