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braxtondn

7 Telltale Signs Social Media Is Killing Your Self-Esteem | Alternet - 1 views

  • Yet what often begins as a harmless virtual habit for some can fast-track into a damaging, narcissism-fueled habit which negatively impacts our self-worth and the way we perceive others
    • braxtondn
       
      Can this be fixed? Does it have to have such a negative impact? Is it really the media or the people on the social networks that are causing the media to have this kind of effect on people
  • Of 298 users, 50 percent said social media made their lives and their self-esteem worse.
  • According to psychotherapist Sherrie Campbell, social media can give us a false sense of belonging and connecting that is not built on real-life exchanges. This makes it increasingly easy to lose oneself to cyberspace connections and give them more weight than they deserve
    • braxtondn
       
      People go on the social medias knowing what to expect. Its up to the person to control whether or not to let the things they see, effect their lifestyle or what they thick of themselves. There are things on many social networks that allow people to edit their photos so they can loo a certain way, in order for it to be acceptable to society and the media. This is another reason how the media is becoming harmful to self-image.
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  • “When we look to social media, we end up comparing ourselves to what we see which can lower our self-esteem. On social media, everyone’s life looks perfect but you’re only seeing a snapshot of reality. We can be whoever we want to be in social media and if we take what we see literally then it’s possible that we can feel we are falling short in life,” Campbell told AlterNe
  • Women who spent longer periods of time on Facebook had a higher incidence of "appearance-focused behavior" (such as anorexia) and were more anxious and body conscience overall. What's more, 20 minutes on social media was enough to contribute to a user’s weight and shape concerns
    • braxtondn
       
      It is amazing how only 20 mins on a social network can have that effect on one's life.  People are more focused on trying to be accepted into society that they will let a social networks and media tell them how to eat, look, and live.
  • It is important to remember that what you are viewing is only a small sliver of someone’s life, which for the most part, is heavily embellished and mostly rooted in fantasy. When such images are starting to poison the way you look at your own life it may be time to step away from the screen.
    • braxtondn
       
      This is one way to fix the effects that media has over people's self image. Just because you see models looking all glamorous on the tv screens, instagram posts, Facebook, or magazine covers, doesn't mean that their life is technically better than your own.
Maryam Kaymanesh

9 Ways Technology Affects Mental Health | Do Something - 1 views

  • Sleep. Using a laptop, cell phone, or iPad late at night can seriously mess with your sleep patterns and habits, potentially leaving you with a sleep disorder.
  • Depression. A Swedish study found that participants who felt the need to have their cell phones constantly accessible were more likely to report depressive mental health symptoms.
  • The popularity of social media and sharing everything has led to this new sensation where everyone from middle school-ers to working adults feel the pressure to attend every event and share every experience.
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  • Research has shown that with the ascent of Internet and technology use, rudeness and incivility on social media sites has also increased.
  • Social media can also cause anxiety such as fear of not being successful enough or smart enough with use of sites like Facebook and Twitter.
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    the bad side?
bdm1chael

The Power of Social Media to Affect Our Health and Fitness - 3 views

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    "Did you Instagram it? No, but it is on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Pinterest... Social media is the new "social life" but has its proliferation changed our once-healthy habits? One billion people couldn't possibly be wrong, right?"
braxtondn

Media Can Damage Self-Image | Psych Central News - 0 views

    • braxtondn
       
      This reminds me of the show "America's Next Top Model" because on their Facebook page, there are only pictures of super skinny females. There are no pictures of thick or plus size females. 
  • The study shows that women who possess these body image concerns are twice as likely to compare their own bodies to those of the thin models in the advertisements
    • braxtondn
       
      Most females have a bad habit of doing this when looking at Vogue Magazine or Seventeen Magazine. People also get discouraged from trying out to become a model because they don't think they have the "model look". It is not a healthy thing to do because it will only cause females to find more problems within themselves
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  • Conversely, women who are content with their bodies did not show any effects from viewing thin-ideal advertisements.
    • braxtondn
       
      Being comfortable in your own skin is the main key to being happy. Some may set goals for losing weight, by looking at other skinny models or the skinny/fit people used for fitness magazines , websites,and commercials.
  • “Women who already have low opinions of their physical appearance are at an even greater risk for negative effects from media images,” says Gayle R. Bessenoff, Ph.D., author of the study
    • braxtondn
       
      Already having low self-esteem can make the effect of media's "acceptable image" more damaging than to a person with a little bit more self-esteem
    • braxtondn
       
      The image that young women may think is acceptable to society is not so acceptable to the media unless you are a thin female. Everybody at some point wants to be thin, but they need to learn to be comfortable in their own skin because not everybody has the same bod shape.
  • The deleterious impact of advertisement is the subject of new research exploring the relationship between the so called “thin-ideal” media message and body-image issues among young women.
  • University of Connecticut researchers discovered female undergraduates who viewed advertisements displaying ultra-thin women exhibited increases in body dissatisfaction, negative mood, levels of depression and lowered self-esteem.
braxtondn

How the Media Affects the Self Esteem and Body Image of Young Girls | Divine Caroline - 0 views

  • The medias harmful affect on the self body image and self esteem of young girls has brought about some of these three damaging effects: eating disorders, mental depression, and physical depression.
    • braxtondn
       
      It is interesting and sad knowing that new media has this affect on young teens. Something should be done in order to help prevent such negative affect. The media needs to recognize that everybody will come in different shapes and sizes, instead of just focusing on one specific image.
  • “Women may directly model unhealthy eating habits presented in the media, such as fasting or purging, because the media-portrayed thin ideal body type is related to eating pathology”(Stice, Schupak-Neuberg, Shaw & Stein, 1994)
  • In Allie Kovar’s article, Effects of the Media on Body Image, she mentions that “the national eating disorder Association (2006) reports that in the past 70 years national rates of incidences of all eating disorders have dramatically increased across the board . . . Bulimia in women between the ages of 10 to 39 has more than tripled.” (Kovar, 1).
    • braxtondn
       
      The media's "thin ideal' is causing young teens to feel so poorly about themselves that it is causing more women to become diagnosed with eating disorders. There is no reason that the media should be having that much of an affect on teens that it is tripling the amount of eating disorders. The media ( actresses, models, and celebrities) should be looked upon by their success not by their body image.
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  • “If children grow up seeing thin women in advertisements, on television, and in film they accept this as reality and try to imitate their appearance and their actions”(Nature vs. Nurture, Shea, 1).
    • braxtondn
       
      THis is very true. Parents can stop this by controlling what their children can and can't watch. THere are so many things that parents can do to help boost their child's self-esteem also, they just need to try harder so that the media doesn't win.
  • “The ideal female has become thinner while the average American woman has become heavier…”(Domil, 2).
    • braxtondn
       
      Whats acceptable to the world is not acceptable to the media. Whats more important though? All that should matter is what each person thinks about themselves. Media is just negatively effecting society's image
  • The media is only going to get worse and put more pressure on the self body image of how it should “ideally” look
    • braxtondn
       
      The media is like an annoying bug that will never go away. We have to be stronger than what the media wants us to be and be above the media's influence.
Mirna Shaban

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted - 1 views

  • Much of the organization and mobilization occurred through the Internet, particularly on social media such as Facebook and Twitter. But social media also played a vital role as a democratic model. Its inclusive space indirectly taught lessons in democracy to a wide sector of Egyptian youth that was not necessarily politically inclined. When the right moment arrived, they were ready to join the revolt.
  • What happened in January 2011 in Egypt did not start in January 2011. It began at least ten years earlier, and it’s not over yet
  • The main catalyst for the January 25 revolution was the Internet, so it may be accurate to describe this as an Internet-based revolution. Not that the Internet was the only factor involved, or that Internet users were the only ones protesting. But the Internet was the tool that showed every dissident voice in Egypt that he or she is not alone, and is indeed joined by at least hundreds of thousands who seek change.
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  • Facebook did not go to Tahrir Square. The people did. Twitter did not go to Al-Qaied Ibrahim Square. The people did.
  • More than one-third of Egypt’s population of eighty million remains illiterate, and just 25 percent of Egyptians use the Internet. However, Facebook and Twitter were instrumental in organizing, motivating, and directing these crowds as to where to go and what to do. Egypt’s revolution was created as an event on Facebook eleven days in advance. People clicked “I’m attending.” Certainly, this was a people’s revolution, yet one based on and accelerated in many ways by the Internet. What happened in Tahrir and every square in Egypt was the accumulation of years and years of activism, including Internet activism. Social media prepared Egyptians for the revolution and enabled them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came.
  • The Internet, by definition, is a democratic medium, at least in the sense that anyone with Internet access is a potential publisher of information.
  • The mere presence of the Internet as a source of information helps open up a freer space for public debate, and makes it much more difficult for governments to censor information.
  • Internet activism started in Egypt with the appearance of Web 2.0 technology in the country around 2003
  • Blogging was the first valuable brainchild of Web 2.0 technologies.
  • The phenomenon exploded in the Arab world, with Egyptian bloggers pioneering and leading the scene. Blogger numbers in the region approached half a million by the beginning of 2009, the great majority of them coming from Egypt.
  • Political blogging in particular became more popular, as users felt that they could remain anonymous if they so wished
  • Nevertheless, most Egyptian political bloggers choose to blog under their real names, which frequently got them in trouble with the regime. The state security crackdown on bloggers was testimony to their potential impact.
  • Undoubtedly, blogging created a space for the voiceless in Egypt.
  • It was the first time individuals felt they could make themselves heard. That in itself was important, whether or not the content was political, and whether or not anyone was reading the blogs. The phenomenon created a venting space for people who had long gone unheard.
  • Early on, Alaa Abdel Fattah and Manal Hassan were awarded the Special Award from Reporters Without Borders in the international Deutsche Welle’s 2005 Weblog Awards (Best of Blogs) contest, where their blog was cited as an instrumental information source for the country’s human rights and democratic reform movement. The husband-and-wife team had created one of Egypt’s earliest blogs, “Manal and Alaa’s Bit Bucket,” where they documented their off-line activism and posted credible information on protests and political movements, election monitoring and rigging, and police brutality.
  • Another award-winning blogger was Wael Abbas. He received several honors, including the 2007 Knight International Journalism Award of the International Center for Journalists for “raising the standards of media excellence” in his country. This was the first time that a blogger, rather than a traditional journalist, won the prestigious journalism award, a testament to the important work such bloggers were doing. In the same year, CNN named Abbas Middle East Person of the Year. He has been instrumental in bringing to light videos of police brutality in Egypt, a topic that was taboo before he and other bloggers ventured into it. As a result of these efforts, the Egyptian government at one point brought three police officers to justice on charges of police brutality for the first time in Egypt’s history; they were convicted and sentenced to three years in jail.
  • As blogging was becoming a phenomenon in Egypt, some political movements started having a strong on-line presence, and taking to the streets based on their on-line organization. The most important was probably the Kefaya movement, whose formal name is The Egyptian Movement for Change. The movement was established in 2004 by a coalition of political forces, and became better known by its Arabic slogan. The word kefaya is Arabic for ‘enough,’ and as the name implies, the movement called for an end to the decades-old Mubarak regime, and for guarantees that his son would not succeed him as president. Kefaya was instrumental in taking people to the streets, thus bridging the gap between the on-line and the off-line worlds. Many of its supporters were bloggers, and many of the street protesters started blogging. So, increasingly, reports on the demonstrations found their way into blogs and were provided media coverage even when the traditional media ignored them or were afraid to cover them. One result was that many more Egyptians gained the courage to write blogs that openly criticized the authoritarian system and crossed the ‘red line’ of challenging their president.
  • nternet applications such as the video-sharing platform YouTube, which appeared in 2005, took blogging to a higher level.
  • hey were also capable of videotaping street protests and uploading the clips on YouTube. Watching people chanting “Down with Hosni Mubarak” in the mid-2000s was a totally new, riveting experience, which led many other brave Egyptians to join these demonstrations. Internet activists and blogger stars such as Wael Abbas, Alaa Abdel Fattah, Manal Hassan, Hossam El-Hamalawy, Malek Mostafa, and others uploaded hundreds of videos of police brutality, election rigging, and different violations of human and civic rights.
  • media, the platforms that allow for wider user discussions and user-generated content such as MySpace, Facebook, and Twitter
  • he next important development came with the introduction of what is typically known as social
  • The structure of social media taught Egyptians that space exists that you can call your own, your space, where you can speak your mind. To many in the West, this is probably no big deal. There are countless venues where they can express their opinions relatively freely. But for people in Egypt, and in the Arab world in general, this was a new phenomenon, and one I believe to be of profound importance.
  • horizontal communication.’ Before social networks, Egyptian youth were accustomed to being talked at, rather than talked to or spoken with. Communication was mostly vertical, coming from the regime down to everyone else
  • Authoritarian patterns of communication do not allow for much horizontal interaction. But social networks do, and eventually their existence on the Internet taught Egyptian youths a few lessons in democratic communication, even if the essence of the conversations carried out was not necessarily political in nature.
  • The bulk of those that I believe were affected by these lessons in democratic expression were clusters of the population that were not previously politically oriented. These form a good sector of those who took to the streets on January 25, and were joined by millions who held their ground in Tahrir Square and in every square in Egypt until Mubarak was toppled. The majority of these millions, including myself, were people who had never participated in a demonstration before. They were not political activists before January 25, but they saw or heard the call for action, and it touched a nerve as they found safety in numbers
  • another function that social networks served: making you realize that you’re not alone.
  • Perhaps the first time Egyptians learned about the power of social networks was on April 6, 2008. Workers in the Egyptian city of Al-Mahalla Al-Kobra planned a demonstration to demand higher wages. Esraa Abdel Fattah, an activist then twenty eight years old, felt for the workers and wanted to help them. She formed a group on Facebook and called it ‘April 6 Strike’ to rally support for the workers.
  • he knew it was too much to ask people to join in the protest, so she simply asked them to participate in spirit by staying home that day, not going to work, and not engaging in any monetary transactions such as buying or selling. The group was brought to the attention of the traditional media and was featured on one of Egypt’s popular talk shows, thus getting more exposure. What ensued surpassed all expectations. To Abdel Fattah’s own surprise (and everyone else’s), the Facebook group immediately attracted some seventy three thousand members. Many of these, and others who got the message through traditional media, decided to stay home in solidarity with the workers. Others were encouraged to stay home by a bad sandstorm that swept across parts of Egypt that day, and yet others stayed home for fear of the strong police presence on the streets.
  • The overall outcome made political activists realize that social networks could be a vital tool in generating support for a political cause, and in encouraging people to join a call for action.
  • The April 6 event was meaningful because it provided a sense that people were actually willing to take an action, to do something beyond clicking a mouse
  • three months before the January 25 revolution, Malcolm Gladwell argued in a much-discussed article in The New Yorker under the title “Small Change: Why the revolution will not be tweeted” that social media can’t provide what social change has always required. He said that social media is good when you’re asking people for small-scale, low-risk action, but not for anything more. “Facebook activism succeeds,” he wrote, “not by motivating people to make a real sacrifice but by motivating them to do the things that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.” He explained that this is because high-risk activism is a “strong-tie phenomenon,” meaning that those who carry out such acts of activism have to personally know each other well and develop strong personal ties before they would risk their lives for each other or for a common cause. Since Facebook and Twitter provide mostly “weak-tie” connections, since users typically have a strong off-line social tie with only a small percentage of their ‘friends’ or ‘followers,’ these social networks were therefore not capable of motivating people for a high-risk cause. He therefore concluded that a social network “makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”
  • nowing that you are in the company of many who share your utter belief in the same cause. That is something that social networks delivered
  • ne of the Facebook pages that played a major role in this regard was the Khaled Said page. Khaled Said was a young Egyptian who was brutally beaten to death by police informants outside an Internet café in Alexandria in June 2010. He had an innocent face that everyone could identify with. He could be anyone, and anyone could’ve been him. The Facebook page “We Are All Khaled Said” appeared shortly thereafter. It started asking its members, whose numbers increased steadily, to go out on silent standing protests in black shirts with their back to the streets. The demonstrations started in Alexandria and soon spread to every governorate in Egypt. Numbers increased with every protest. More and more people gained a little more courage and tasted the freedom of dissent.
  • One of the main advantages of the Khaled Said page was how well organized the events were. Protesters were provided with exact times and locations, and given exact instructions on what to wear, what to do, as well as who to contact in the case of any problems with security forces.
  • t was the Khaled Said page that eventually posted the ‘event’ for a massive demonstration on January 25, Egypt’s Police Day.
  • The administrators usually polled their users, asking them to vote for their place or time of preference for the next protest. The responses would be in the thousands, sometimes tens of thousands, and the administrators would read them all, and give a breakdown, with exact numbers and percentages, of the votes.
  • The January 25 demonstration was motivated and aided by an important intervening variable, the revolt in Tunisia. When Tunisian protesters succeeded in ousting President Zine El-Abidine Ben Ali on January 14, Egyptians felt that toppling a dictator through demonstrations was finally possible.
  • he Khaled Said page, which by then had about six hundred thousand followers, demonstrated its strong ability to organize. They listed all the major squares in every Egyptian governorate where they expected people to gather, and again gave specific instructions on what to wear, what to take with you, and who to contact in times of trouble. They then alerted the users that the listed venues for demonstration would change at midnight on January 24 to give police forces a lesser chance of mobilizing against them the next day. On the morning of January 25, there were close to half a million people who had clicked “I’m attending” the revolution. Today, the Khaled Said page has more than 1.7 million users, by far more than any other Egyptian Facebook page.
  • nd indeed that was what happened. We witnessed another key moment illustrating the power of the interaction between social media, traditional media, and interpersonal communication. Newspapers, broadcasters, and on-line outlets had been discussing the potential ‘Facebook demonstration’ for a few days prior to January 25. As groups of demonstrators marched through the streets enroute to main squares chanting “Ya ahalina endamo lina,” (“Friends and family, come join us”), people watching from their balconies and windows heeded the calls and enabled the protests to snowball to unprecedented numbers. People were galvanized by the sight. The core activists, who attended every demonstration for years, were suddenly seeing new faces on January 25, mostly mobilized by the Internet. They came by the thousands, and then by the hundreds of thousands, numbers larger than anyone had expected.
  • Twitter played an important though slightly different role. Crucial messages relayed in short bursts of one hundred and forty characters or less made protesters ‘cut to the chase.’ Most activists tweeted events live rather than posting them on Facebook. Twitter was mainly used to let people know what was happening on the ground, and alert them to any potential danger. It usually was ahead of Facebook in such efforts. Twitter also enabled activists to keep an eye on each other. Some managed to tweet ‘arrested’ or ‘taken by police’ before their mobile phones were confiscated. Those words were incredibly important in determining what happened to them and in trying to help them. Most activists are, to this day, in the habit of tweeting their whereabouts constantly, even before they go to sleep, because they know that fellow activists worry if they disappear from the Twittersphere.
  • When the Egyptian regime belatedly realized on January 25 how dangerous social networks could be to its survival, the first thing it did was block Twitter. Internet censorship is a ridiculously ineffective strategy, though. Users were tech-savvy enough to find their way onto proxy servers within minutes, and to post on Facebook how to gain access to Twitter and how to remain on Facebook if the regime blocks it, which indeed happened later. The government felt it didn’t have any other option but to block all Internet access in the country for five days starting January 27 (as well as mobile telephone communications for one day). By then it was too late. People had already found their way to Tahrir and nearly every square in Egypt. Ironically, some were partly motivated by the Internet and communication blockage to take to the streets to find out what was happening and be part of it. And they were joined by workers’ movements in many governorates that expanded the protester numbers into the millions. The major squares of Egypt were full of people of every age, gender, religion, creed, and socio-economic status
  • Gladwell, it turned out, was wrong. These people didn’t know each other personally, but the “weak” personal ties had not proved a barrier to high-risk activism. Egyptians discovered the strong tie of belonging to the common cause of ousting a dictator
  • ocial network users were not the only ones revolting, and social networks were not the only reason or motivation for revolt. However, the role that social media have played over the years in indirectly preparing sectors of Egyptian youths for this moment, and in enabling them to capitalize on an opportunity for change when the time came, cannot be understated.  It can also be said that the role of social networks in Egypt has hardly ended. The revolution is not yet complete. 
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