Essena O'Neill, a beautiful, young, thin, and artistic girl with access to a smart-phone and social media apps, an understanding of personal public relations, and en eye for picking and editing the best photo's of herself, found her way to half a million followers commenting and liking her posts daily.
O'Neill isn't the only one, either. An online article from Elle explains this idea of an Instagram celebrity as a new form of "famous."
The article says that she "deleted 2000 photos, renamed her account to "Social Media Is Not Real Life," and changed the captions on existing photos with truthful anecdotes about posts she was paid for, how many tries it took to get the shot, and the pressures she felt to look perfect."
I am assuming that Essena O'Neill spent tons of money (for makeup, makeup tools, hair products, hair styling tools, hair dyes, possibly tanning, wardrobe, accessories, etc.) and time (fixing her makeup, fixing her hair, taking sometimes up to one hundred photos, and then spending even more time editing them on several apps, and then even more time updating herself on the likes, shares, and comments on them) getting her Instagram perfect. On top of that, some of the outfits she wore, she never liked or even went out of her house in. She simply would put on an outfit and get done up, to promote a product to gain some cash and social approval. Her candid photo's weren't actually candid, there were hundreds of photos to choose from, and she was aware that a photo was being taken.
I could not find her last post again, but Elle magazine quoted it in the following paragraph taken from their website:
"I've spent the majority of my teenage life being addicted to social media, social approval, social status, and my physical appearance, " O'Neill writes in her last Instagram post on October 27, "[Social media] is contrived images and edited clips ranked against each other. It's a system based on social approval, likes, validation, in views, success in followers. it's perfectly orchestrated self-absorbed judgement."
I understand where she was coming from. Before college, social-media was on the rise and I was a high-school girl who wanted to be popular, and liked by the boys, and wanted to be seen as more of an adult than I most definitely was. I was consumed by likes, and what people had to say about me, and eventually I started thinking that the image of myself was actually more important than myself.
I got really depressed, because I was always worried about what other people saw in me, and was always trying to paint the perfect picture of my completely imperfect self, and life. I forgot to give my insides, my character, my heart, my intentions, my goals and my dreams, the attention that they deserves, because I was so focused on the outside.
Now, a few years later, I am a Public Relations professional. That means that I totally understand and utilize social media. I see all of the good in it, and all of the ways that it shares content, messages, ideas, art, etc. to virtually anybody that you want. It is a truly wonderful, exciting, and important tool.
Unfortunately, it is also a tool that we are using to lie to our young girls and boys. It is not the image that we are posting that is bad. Of course we want to share our best images. The bad part is that some girls out there don't know the difference between what is real, and what is on social media, and are worshiping and obsessing over attaining the unreal and unattainable portrayal of some of these Instagram celebrities lives and selves; it is the self esteem and confidence issues that arise from us not being truthful about experiences as humans.
We should not be afraid to post awesome pictures of ourselves that make us feel confident, but we should be always focusing more on what kind of person we are, not appear to be. Also, it is our responsibility to make sure that the young people using social media understand that it is a business and personal marketing tool, not a representation of reality.
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