Jacob Silverman's Argument On Using Social Media

When teenage girls are bored, they tend to spend time on social media admiring images of beautiful women, causing them to feel self- conscious about the way they look. With the impression of social media being a time consumer, an article by Kelly Wallace argues, “Girls, on average, spend about 40 minutes more on social networks than boys, with girls spending about an hour and a half a day on social media and boys a little under an hour” (Wallace). With girls spending that much time on different social media platforms, like Instagram, Twitter and Facebook, it is easy for teenage girls, ages 12 to 19, to become timid about their bodies. When those girls become insecure, they turn to dieting, starving themselves, and start to suffer from Anorexia
Author, Jacob Silverman, uses the ideas from a Danish academic, Anders Colding- Jørgensen, to explain his viewpoint on using social media to put oneself out there for everyone to see. “’We should no longer see the Internet as a post office where information is sent back and forth, but rather as an open arena for our identity and self- promotion – an arena that is a legitimate part of reality, just like our homes, workplaces and other social arenas in our society’” (Silverman 163). Silverman is supporting the idea of anorexics showing themselves off and posting how far they have come because they are able to self-promote with social media. Anorexics tend to self-promote themselves without meaning to but instead just to share with others what they have gone through with diverse social media
Once they do that, they are stuck wanting to live their lives like the people in the photo they are seeing, or worse, to look like them. After they get that look in their head of the “ideal” body, they will do anything they can to achieve that body. Day after day, they resort to Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook to see the updated photo of the women they idolize. Considering the viewpoints of ex-anorexics, physicians, and anorexics on contributors to Anorexia Nervosa, it is easy to see that their stories all line up. It all comes back to social media. Anorexia Nervosa is a disease that is easy to spot if you are looking for the symptoms, but if not; they will bury themselves in their lettuce and social media in order to hide themselves from everyone around them. Next time you post on social media, think about it. Will it cause someone to meditate badly about themselves, and if so, is that something that should be