Everything is colorful, sparkles, flashes, everyone laughs, everything is beautiful. You have the opportunity to experience the great life of your friends and share your own. Through comments, likes and the direct messages you can communicate and interact with your friends or new people. You can get inspired, discover new opportunities and possibilities, or even convince others about yourself and inspire them. It all sounds like a beautiful world on Instagram and a good exchange with social contacts.
So why is Instagram increasingly portrayed as toxic, why are more and more warnings being issued, and why is this app even said to lead to depression? I would like to explore these questions at the beginning of my research and uncover the risks that this supposedly beautiful illusory world brings with it.
Anxious, Stressed, Depressed:
People tend to seek for a digital status (online popularity) and compare themselves to others. These behaviors are leading to depressive symptoms such as anxiety, body concerns and lower self-esteem.
The problem with comparing oneself online is that users not only see their friends, but also many people they would never meet in real life and whose pictures have usually been edited with heavy filters. The boundaries between friends and celebrities become blurred. This then leads to a false social comparison, as users start to compare themselves with people and make them their ideal image, who in this way do not exist at all.
Users also begin to edit their own images and adjust their weight, for example, because of this social pressure. This also leads to eating disorders. A study at Florida State University found that one in three women edit their pictures before posting them, and this also has a direct correlation with dissatisfaction about their own bodies.
Another study showed that people who were shown photos of fitness, beauty and modeling experienced increased negative mood and anxiety than the control group who were shown neutral images (nature, food).
These were just a few examples of what Instagram does to us and our body image. Numerous of studies indicate that the use of the app from the point of view of edited images can lead to severe anxiety, eating disorders, insecurities and depressive feelings.
So this is a big, if not the biggest, risk that Instagram brings and that I think needs to be countered. I will discuss other risks and initial counter-movements in the following blog posts.
