Recently, the realm of the social media community was targeted by Instagram celebrity, Essena O’Neill. She attempted to start a movement due to her perception that social media is a fake interpretation of a person that lacks inspiration and honesty. She encouraged her followers to come to the realization that social media is inauthentic, edited and staged images to receive more likes, followers and ultimately, popularity. Personally, I find that her argument is invalid and too general for everyone to support and believe in. It was Essena’s decision to present herself in such ways that made a negative impact on her self confidence. Many people use social media platforms for a variety reasons that construct numerous categories in which people may not identify with Essena’s point of view.
Van Dijk’s neoliberal economic principles illustrate how connectivity can cause social pressure and competitions between users. This can be in the form of the amount of likes on an image or the number of followers in which people compete for popularity. These platforms such as Instagram use technology to allow people to display content in creative ways as a personal depiction of their life. This perspective can be applied to Essena O’Neill since her claims state that people like herself only post “perfect” images that took a lot of effort to highlight her appearance, materials and life events. These online communities have such a large audience that people may feel the need to stand out and be idealized by others. These platforms can cause pressure to create something better to increase their social media ranking in the form of likes, comments and followers. Van Dijk’s “strategic alliances” can be seen as tactics such as the way people edit, take pictures, team up with similar users to display their online presence and social identity in a specific way. These sort of ideas demonstrate Van Dijk’s and Essena’s arguments on how society values popularity which creates pressure to be the best.
In contrast to Essena O'Neill and Van Dijk, social media is used for various reasons such as promoting one’s work, products or capabilities, advertising, raising awareness, or personally communicating with a community. Essena’s argument cannot be applied to all of these categories that have genuine intentions to advance their career or engage with others. Although neoliberal economic principles apply to Essena, other users cannot relate since they do not feed off of the “cool factor” by presenting oneself in such a way to gain popularity. Essena’s perspective is one end of the spectrum that illustrates how social media can negatively impact society although it is an unfair argument to generalize all social media users as fake and dishonest since people have a variety of intentions.
You raised an interesting point about social media and I enjoyed reading it. Like most technologies, social media can be used for either positive or negative intentions. A lot of talented individuals made good use of social media and it helped them showcase their work. For example, a lot of photographers on instagram have used it to promote themselves and get discovered by clients. So it is really a matter of how you use social media and for what purpose.
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