Body Image And Social Media

Self-absorption attitudes in adolescents and young adults are influenced by social media to develop body image and empathy issues. For example, “Social Media and Narcissism: Rise of A Self-Obsessed Society”, written and published by Jay Thadeshwar, describes how “blogs and social media … encourage constant [self-absorption] by allowing [individuals] to broadcast details of their lives” (1). Narcissism and self-absorption are synonyms relating to the same thing—feeling extreme confidence in one’s physical appearance or characteristics. When adolescents use media to post images of themselves, they cannot help but compare what they look like to others. This comparison is needed to validate an individual’s expectations of themselves. If these expectation are are not meant, then an overcoming feeling of emotion can lead to a disorder that

Issues of the body that stem from self-absorption are created from society’s expectation that women are to have skinny torsos with wide hips, while men are expected to be muscular with abs. Social Media augments the perception of human beauty and leads to emotional and physical harm. Similarly, in Pamela Paul’s article “From Students, Less Kindness for Strangers?” she writes about the social tendencies of generations, where researcher Sara Konrath found that Millennials “scored significantly lower in the empathetic concern (a 48 percent)” (1). The ability to understand and feel the emotion of another person makes an individual empathetic. Millennials, born in the early 80’s to late 90’s, demonstrated empathy issues; social networking encourages narcissistic behavior through the ‘liking’ of pictures where the more likes of a photo are associated to increased feeling of one’s self-esteem (E). Their self-absorbed actions are to be blamed by the entitlement attitude where the user assumes everyone agrees with that person’s