

The use of Instagram and social media in general effects a teenager’s, women’s, or even an athlete’s body image by the amount of likes they get, amount of people who comment up under their picture and how they are perceived by their peers. Social media has become a threat to many in the world today by making them think they are not good enough because they do not look like someone famous. There are a lot of people who think Instagram has a negative effect on teenagers and how they perceive themselves. On the other hand, Sarah Gervais thinks Instagram and social media in general have a positive effect on girls/teenagers. She talks about how photography plays a big role in how girls feel about themselves. She also said editing pictures makes them feel good. Girls take outsiders perspective of their bodies and they see themselves through the same view that the photograph might use when the camera is zoomed in on their bad spots helping covering them up. She says that when girls edit their pictures, it makes them feel better about themselves. How girls are perceiving their selves through the camera lens does not affect how they feel about themselves because they think how other people think they look is all that matters so when it comes down to it girls do not let Instagram affect them because editing their photo makes them feel good. But when you think about Instagram, you do not think of positive look. You think about negative view points on how teenagers view themselves and how other people view them as well. 

 People rely on what other people think about them and let their opinions affect them in ways that make them not like their selves. In a research study, research investigating of the predictors of Social Networking site indicated that body image satisfaction is associated with increased selfie posting on Instagram relates to conflict which also relates to increase in negative romantic relationship outcomes. This results in this study indicated that body image satisfaction is continuously associated with the increase of Instagram selfie posting and in Instagram related conflict, which is also related to increase on negative romantic relationship outcomes. Not only does Instagram affect people but it can get personal and affect someone’s relationship. While reading that part, it is insane to think people let a social media site ruin not only their view of themselves but their relationship with their partner. These real known people stated facts in a research study based on self-satisfaction and how outsiders view them. 

It is said that anxiety causes stress to an average student’s college experience. People in the article were interviewed, they mentioned how they think that since people think they have to be the perfect person for everyone else that how they see themselves does not matter. “I think it adds a lot of pressure to be the perfect person because that’s how we can make ourselves look online,” says Shannon Smith,18, Columbia College Chicago student. That they rely on social media to help them with that and that they rely on what they are perceived as instead of just being themselves. Twenty-three college students said they believe social media is a main factor in anxiety or added stress to student’s experience in college. Almost all of college students say they’ve experienced some type of fear of missing out and that when they view photos of their peers having fun, they begin to feel not as important. Some students feel as if they need to post something on social media to make it look like they are having fun. “You might just be trying to study and feel pressured to look like you’re having fun and post it online as if you’re having a great time and college is awesome, when in reality it might not be,” said Brandy Miller. A lot of student also said that social media tends to get in their way of school work. Some students said they find themselves logging onto social media site when they know they should be studying. Social media is starting to take over students and their education because they feel as if they do not fit in with their friends. Social media also is distracting students from their school work and focusing on what is important.   

This problem associated with Instagram not only affects regular day to day people but it does also affect athletes and how well they are known. Researchers selected a day that they would work backwards from collected data of the 50 most recent photos from different athletes Instagram account. They analyzed the photo and caption separately. The researchers collected data from several sports based on their photos from their Instagram account. According to  the article, “The sample yielded 1,352 photographs and captions. The breakdown for photographs is as follows: 202 came from basketball, 200 from soccer, 151 from tennis, 199 from track, and 200 each from golf, swimming, and baseball/softball.”  They broke the examination into three parts, how athletes use pictures on their Instagram as a form of self-presentation, what major differences were in the gender displays of self-presentation and analyzed the captions used by athletes on their pictures. The article results came back in full perspective of how athletes rely on the public and how they are viewed by the public. This research desired to expand on this information regarding self-presentation of athletes, focusing on a visual social media medium. They found in the sample that half of the athletes were engaged in a form of touch in some way. Females were the athletes more likely to be engaged in that type of behavior. But regrading to results and the study that was done, public image to athletes mean very much to them and how they continue to look at themselves.  

In several articles and researches you can tell how people perceive themselves is a high key factor to them. There was a study done on the effect of Instagram usage on body satisfaction and to see whether this effect is caused by the appearance self-schema and self-discrepancy, and to see whether self-esteem moderates this effect. “Body image is defined as one’s attitudinal disposition toward that physical self which includes evaluative, cognitive, and behavioral components.” (Ahadzadeh) The study followed the bootstrapping procedures, bootstrapping provides you with higher statistical power and more accurate solutions for testing of the indirect effects than other methods used. The results in this study showed that Instagram usage infringe upon young adults’ body image satisfaction. The significant negative interaction of self-esteem and Instagram usage indicate that self-esteem weakens the effect of Instagram usage on self-schema. Self-schema is a lot stronger for people with a lower level self-esteem. Results also showed self-esteem moderates the influence of Instagram photo exposure on body image that is mediate by appearance self-schema and appearance self-discrepancy. The results of this study show that Instagram usage intrude upon young adults’ body image satisfaction. 

 On an online video broadcasted on YouTube, this girl is explaining that girls look at their peers on Instagram by viewing their photos and wishing they were them instead of being happy with their selves. She also interviews this woman over the phone who almost killed herself from an eating disorder because she was not pleased with herself. Up until her early twenties she tried to be someone she was not. At twenty-one she had to fake her own death and at the age of thirty-two her sister died, she had a little girl and thought to herself this is not how I want my daughter to live. She said it took a toll on her and was eye opening. The main point is that, you should love yourself as who you are. Trying to be someone you are not or trying to be someone different than who you are, can cause not only damage emotionally but physically. 

There has been recent research on fMRI scanner images of the brains of 32 teenagers as they use social media app resembling Instagram. “When teens learn that their own pictures have supposedly received a lot of likes, they show significantly greater activation in parts of the brain’s reward circuitry,” says lead author Lauren Sherman, “This is the same group of regions responding when we see pictures of a person we love or when we win money.” The researchers watched the brain activity as teens used the app and they found that certain regions become activated by “likes”, with the brains reward center becoming more active. They also showed the teenagers 140 pictures where the “likes” were believed to be from their peers, but they were assigned by the research team. The article states, “Scans revealed that the nucleus accumbens, a part of the brain’s reward circuitry, was especially active when teens saw a large number of likes on their own photos, which could inspire them to use social media more often.” They found that the teenager’s brains were more active when the teens saw a large number of likes on their own pictures, so they think that is what inspires teens to use social media more. The researchers also used peer influence to see how the teenagers would act and they found that the teenagers are more likely to like the popular pictures that their friends like. The teenagers were more likely to like the popular pictures regardless of what they showed. Researchers also think social media is the reason why teenager’s brains change and grow the way they do. By using social media, a teenagers’ brain is active from using Instagram and while using this app their brains are allotted by the likes they get and how outsiders perceive them. A lot of younger kids that use Instagram grow up thinking that how people view them is important. The youth of the United States should not have to grow up thinking it is okay to let another person’s view of them be how they continue to look at their own selves. 

While thinking about Instagram, they say that Instagram feeds do more damage to someone’s body image than billboards. A lot of people edit their pictures to cover blemishes, hide dark spots or make their face look thinner. When people see other attractive images on Instagram, research shows that people often compare their own body image to those images and they think they are less attractive than the pictures that they see. Everyone knows that these comparisons can make women unhappy with how they look and make them feel even worst about themselves more so than how they felt before. Body Dissatisfaction is a main predictor of eating disorders. Research has focus on people comparing their own bodies to models on TV, in magazines, or on Instagram. A lot of women mostly thought others looked better than them on Instagram, this is due to women posting the most attractive images of themselves on Instagram and enhancing those images to look like women in magazines, that are routinely edited. In a study, 150 female undergraduate students answered an online survey five times a day for five days. For each of the surveys, they had to report if they had compared their appearance with someone else’s and whether or not they made the comparison after looking at social media, traditional media, or in person. They had to also report if they thought the person looked better or the same or worse than them. Also on the survey they had to rate their body image, mood and thoughts of being on a diet and exercising. The article says, “Women mostly thought others looked better than them on social media. This is likely due to women selectively posting the most attractive images of themselves on social media and enhancing those images to look like images in magazines, which are routinely edited. Women have reported to be in a bad mood after comparing their selves to other women on social media. People who use social media in a daily routine who make comparisons to other people need to try and avoid social media and stay away from it so they feel better about themselves. 

There is a plot twist to how woman judge themselves and how they do it, magazines and Victoria Secret ads are not the only thing from keeping women not liking their selves but social media is on another level. From Disney movies, Barbie dolls, and photo shopped women in magazines, it ultimately effects the self-esteem of young girls and women in relation to their own body image. “They’re photo shopped; nobody really looks like that.” Yes, a lot of people know that and that is a fact, in general hopefully women in real life acknowledge that women do not really look like that. Social media is very threating to young women on a new level as it gives the impression of normality. Several women follow different accounts so that they can look at them and feel as if that is how they should look. “Some of them are ‘famous’ solely due to the fact that they fit society’s standards of sex appeal and take advantage of it by posting half-naked photos on Instagram. Worse yet, their photos are re-posted on ‘feature’ accounts, such as @inlove_withfitness, where photos of petite women are mass-collected alongside pictures of fresh fruit and squat tutorials,” states the article. When other girls see these women working out or eating right, they think since they are doing it that they have to do it as well so they can look just like them. No matter what, when you see a picture posted in Instagram, it always appears candid. It gives women an illusion that these images are not professional, they are subjects that are not altered or photo shopped ahead the adding of a filter. It gives women the thought that this is how women look in real life when that may or may not be the case. When doing so, it gives a singular kind of beauty in the minds of women who see it. “She has millions of followers because she is beautiful. I want to be beautiful like her. I want her life.” When reading this, social media has a tremendous responsibility for how women portray themselves and not is a horrible thing.

With doing research and reading about the ways social media can harm someone or make someone disown themselves because they do not look as good as someone on TV or in a magazine is disappointing. Research has been done on women, teenagers, athletes, etc. showing how social media and Instagram plays considerable amounts of roles on their lives. A lot of people let social media and Instagram control them and make them think that they need to look like someone else instead of them. What these girls are experiencing is a world where counting calories and talking about eating less with their friends is the norm. There are websites that give girls steps on how to be anorexic. This is ridiculous, no one should have to feel like they are not good enough to live in this world based on other people. Instagram nor social media should be the reason someone feels less of them 
