Upon reading the article by Kim and Kim on how social media affects self-esteem, confidence, and body image, I could not help but relate much of this with my personal experiences. Hence, this propelled me to select this article for my reflection. The scholars bring to the discussion topics relevant to social media users of how social media affects their perception of self, both physically and mentally. Often, we scroll through applications like Instagram out of boredom, but little do we realise the psychological impact they have on us, given our time and exposure to the kind of content we consume. Kim and Kim lay a strong focus on how such content creates a pressure on us to compare ourselves negatively to those who we feel are better than us (upward comparison) and positively to those who we feel are inferior (downward comparison). Not only does this destroy our self-confidence, but it leads to a larger issue of relying on the validation of strangers for our daily happiness. Such validation is sought through the number of likes, views, physical appearance, etc., which leads us to have “facial dissatisfaction” (Kim and Kim 2). Owing to how validated we feel from the positive and uplifting comments of strangers or distant connections, we base our personality on portraying our best-filtered selves on Instagram (Kim and Kim 3). “Body image is a perception or judgement of an individual’s own body” (Kim and Kim 3). This quote particularly stood out to me because in today’s age of social media, it is concerning how one’s body image is affected so much by others’ perceptions.
Being a Gen-Z woman who is an avid social media scroller, especially Instagram, I find the concepts of downward and upward comparison to be anything but foreign to me. Kim and Kim also bring up how Instagram stories only last 24 hours compared to posts which always remain on your feed, unless archived or deleted. Stories might be viewed as less risky a medium as compared to posts, when it comes to posting something which one is conscious about. However, from my personal experiences, I have seen people, including myself, think ample of times before making a post and even before posting a story due to the judgement of others. Yes, the process of posting a story is usually always shorter and quicker though.
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