DIY Projects – Abby Rose

Facetune and photoshop pervade Instagram and other social media spaces at the expense of female body images.

Instagram can be an excellent space for cultivating social and artistic creativity. But what happens when the images we see do not match reality? It is this fine line between freedom of expression and misinformation that can be detrimental to the mental health and self-perception of social media users.

Throughout my PSA video, I explore the idea that editing one’s body and posting these heavily edited images is harmful to the body image and stereotypes we perpetuate to vast audiences on social media platforms. I tap into ideas surrounding “misinformation campaigns” and “loss of trust in sources of information,” although not in the typical sense.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/mirandagardley.wordpress.com/2016/02/10/social-medias-impact-on-body-image/amp/

The misinformation found in photoshopped pictures on Instagram is of the visual variety. Users are exposed to unrealistic body images and develop absurd ideas as to what they should look like based on posts that have been doctored to such a degree they would be almost unrecognizable in their original state.

Once users, particularly young women as I describe in my PSA, are made aware of the disparity between reality and the pictures they see on Instagram, this leads to the “loss of trust” element. Social media becomes much less of a creative, enjoyable space once you realize how fraudulent it truly is. It becomes hard to differentiate between real images and heavily edited images, and as such, young women’s perceptions of themselves and their bodies are subject to both.

In my PSA, I made an effort to balance the statistics surrounding how photoshopping impacts the mental health of women with footage of women actually discussing how photoshop makes them feel when they see their own bodies put through the image-doctoring process. I also included visuals of bodies undergoing both subtle and significant alterations to emphasize the scope of image editing that exists on Instagram. You might stumble across an image that is imperceptibly altered to the point where you would never notice, or you might see a photo edited so heavily that the original picture is unrecognizable. Both are harmful and misleading in different ways, and the prevalence of photo-doctoring of all forms on Instagram is disturbing.

I made a few specific editing choices throughout my video, attempting to transition with key words. If one clip or visual utilized a term that was important within another clip or visual, I would transition between the two as seamlessly as possible. I also tried to move through the narrative sequentially, beginning with someone opening Instagram and seeing a picture of Kylie Jenner, someone who has historically perpetuated unrealistic body standards, before delving into “average” individuals discussing their experiences with photoshop and the statistics discussing the damage photoshop does to social media users.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.today.com/today/amp/tdna128500

The conclusion I offer is pretty straightforward: stop doctoring the images you post on social media or think critically before posting something that could be misleading to your audience in a negative way. The other potential “fix” is transparency. If celebrities and other prominent figures reveal their past photoshopping escapades, it at least begins the conversation around body image on social media and we can begin to evaluate the images we see more critically. Everyone wants to look their best on social media, but if the “best” you are presenting is not real and could end up convincing someone else that their “best” is simply not enough, then it is time to reevaluate whether such images should be posted at all.

SOURCES (in order of appearance in video)

Jaws is a classic film that has inspired fear in the hearts of children and adults alike for decades. Its classic horror premise and suspenseful cinematography have secured it as a film that will be remembered and cherished for decades to come as well.

https://www.arthipo.com/jaws-movie-poster.html

The central premise of Jaws is fear. The people fear this monstrous threat coming from the ocean, stealing the lives of the inhabitants and visitors of Amity island. The fear tactics used in the film are very real and very effective. To this day, it is hard for almost anyone to enter the ocean without at least a trace of fear concerning what lays below. However, if we look at the film in a modern context with our increased awareness of the threat we ourselves pose to the ocean, the fear and monstrosity have a totally new victim in mind.

https://theconversation.com/whose-job-is-it-to-clear-up-all-the-rubbish-floating-in-the-oceans-25082

My goal in this revised version of the classic Jaws movie poster was to emphasize the real threat. The woman who is originally dwarfed by the massive great white below her is replaced by a large pile of waste and debris that rests just above the tip of the shark’s nose. It looks as though that is what the shark will be consuming rather than the woman, which may seem a lot less scary for us, but the reality is the number of people killed by sharks is minuscule when compared to the threat of plastic and other human waste on sea life.

The shark is also now missing teeth. This is representative of the fact that intimidating creatures like sharks cannot even possess a threat to us when we kill them with our carelessness and waste of resources. The toothless shark poses no threat to us, and yet we nearly kill it with our lack of regard for the environment.

I also changed the “Jaws” text to “Waste.” This is a synonym for ocean pollution, but it also implies a waste of the beauty of the ocean and ocean life. By filling the ocean with plastic, overfishing, and other harmful practices, we are wasting this beautiful and once abundant resource. A change must be made soon if we do not want to lose it entirely.