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Is Social Media Destroying Your Self-Esteem?: Décor and House Beautiful. Jezebel Defended Pinterest As Allowing Women To

The document discusses whether time spent on social media has a negative effect on women's self-esteem. It notes that women spend more time than men on sites like Pinterest and Facebook, which are filled with aspirational images and messages replicating traditional gender norms from magazines and media. While sites try to curb content that could damage self-image, like "thinspiration" pins, researchers have not found conclusive evidence on how social media influences women's self-perceptions compared to offline media.

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Akash Stewart
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57 views2 pages

Is Social Media Destroying Your Self-Esteem?: Décor and House Beautiful. Jezebel Defended Pinterest As Allowing Women To

The document discusses whether time spent on social media has a negative effect on women's self-esteem. It notes that women spend more time than men on sites like Pinterest and Facebook, which are filled with aspirational images and messages replicating traditional gender norms from magazines and media. While sites try to curb content that could damage self-image, like "thinspiration" pins, researchers have not found conclusive evidence on how social media influences women's self-perceptions compared to offline media.

Uploaded by

Akash Stewart
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Is Social Media Destroying Your Self-

Esteem?

Women are now more active than men across major social media platforms
such as Twitter, Pinterest and Facebook and have a stronger attachment to
social networking than do men, but does time spent online and the
aspirational messages they’re bombarded with on these sites actually have a
negative effect on their psyches? Considered in light of Newsweek’s
recent feature on the mounting evidence that intense internet usage
contributes to increased anxiety and depression and even psychosis, it’s a fair
and timely question to ask. 

Take for example, Pinterest, where 82% of traffic comes from women.
Pinterest is now a top driver of traffic to the websites of women’s lifestyle,
home décor and cooking mags, including Martha Stewart, Elle
Décor and House Beautiful. Jezebel defended Pinterest as allowing women to
create an image of their ideal life through collected imagery, but their
endorsement reads more like vapid  and dated marketing copy than a shrewd
assessment of the site’s value to members:

The fact that there’s such a synchronicity between digital preferences and
traditional print content – and Jezebel’s summary of Pinterest is
indistinguishable from the description of a new Martha Stewart media
property - could also point to the fact that messaging aimed at women in the
online space simply replicates the offline gender norms that women’s
magazines, tv and movies have been preaching for decades and that female
consumers have alternately embraced and struggled against. Pinterest itself
has acknowledged the potential for pinned content to be damaging to users’
self-images and deemed this a big enough issue to opt for banning
thinspiration or ‘thinspo’  pin boards, where members post aspirational
images and links related to dieting and extreme weight loss. The Atlantic
weighed in on the repetitive and patronizing nature of women-aimed content
by citing nine examples of female-friendly stories that journalists should stop
writing. More innocuously, but no less gender-normative, BuzzFeed ran 125
Reasons Why Guys Are Scared Of Pinterest a couple of months ago – a listicle
round-up of high school level wisdom in the form of relationship quotes, gifs
or placards posted on the popular platform that would be right at home in a
quote of the month calendar given to you one Christmas by a well-meaning
aunt.

But is this cliched content doing real damage?

“Despite there being a large body of research around self-image, social


comparison and media images of women, we haven't yet seen meaningful
research addressing how social media, blogging, or text-based media influence
women's self-perceptions. There has been far more focus on social media
behavior, such as behavior of youth on social networks and how this affects
self-esteem. But I have not seen any research on social comparison effects of
lifestyle blogging,” says San Francisco-based psychologist Dr. Keely Kolmes.

Author J. Henderson
Article title: Is Social Media Destroying Your Self-Esteem?
Website title: Forbes
Url : https://www.forbes.com/sites/jmaureenhenderson/2012/07/11/is-social-media-
destroying-your-self-esteem/#164da2da4e89

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