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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.

“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).

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

self-portraits are an extension of their self-absorption, while others view it as nothing more than an outlet for self-expression,

As tweens and teens try to form their identity, selfies serve as a way to test how they look, and therefore feel, in certain outfits, make-up, poses and places. And because they live in a digital world, self-portraits provide a way of participating and affiliating with that world.

they are simply reflections of their self-exploration and nothing more. “Self captured images allow young adults and teens to express their mood states and share important experiences,”

t’s a truism that Facebook is the many-headed frenemy, the great underminer. We know this because science tells us so. The Human–Computer Institute at Carnegie Mellon has found that your “passive consumption” of your friends’ feeds and your own “broadcasts to wider audiences” on Facebook correlate with feelings of loneliness and even depression

Even the positive effects of Facebook can be double-edged: Viewing your profile can increase your self-esteem, but it also lowers your ability to ace a serial subtraction task.

A closer look at Facebook studies also supports an untested but tantalizing hypothesis: that, despite all the evidence, Facebook is actually not the greatest underminer at the social-media cocktail party (that you probably weren’t invited to, but you saw the pictures and it looked incredible). Facebook is not the frenemy with the most heads. That title, in fact, goes to Instagram

So, if you’re doing a little more than documenting the moments of your life, and obsessing about your image seems to be taking over your life, what can you do to put things into perspective? “Make sure the focus is on the internal as much as the external,” says Weiner. “If all the images are fabricated to a degree, they’re not really showing life as it really is. Not all moments are perfect and model-ready. Enjoy your beauty, take that selfie, but be present for those memories while you're taking the photo.”

“It depends on how you use it. If you're using it as a tool to document feeling good about yourself and you’re just taking mementos of living a great life, that’s fine.”

“It can be empowering. Some women use it as a way to control how their image is portrayed in social media, which is completely fine.”

the photoshopped images and super-skinny smiling blondes of popular teen magazines

“We know that Photoshop can be very harmful to girls because they think they have to look like these images. But it’s not even real, it’s Photoshop. So it’s kind of impossible to look like that in real life.

Magazines, as mentioned above, play a hugely important role in the development and sustaining of girls’ and women’s self-images. They’re also hugely prevalent pieces of our culture, with Vogue and Seventeen leading the way because of their sheer popularity and branding power

If you look at the application from this website (http://www.cwtv.com/thecw/topmodel-cycle20-casting), there is a requirement that you had to be 5 foot and 7 inches at the absolute minimum to be a model, but I was only 5 foot at the time, so wouldn’t be eligible. I always had hope, though, that by the age of 18, I would be tall enough to apply. I think that’s where the show starts to become bad for people, especially women. It makes us want to look different, in order to do the career we dream of.

it’s really altering their views on what an attractive woman looks like, and what kind of woman the media wants to see

The show is also teaching girls that you should want to be objectified, because all of the model contestants want so badly want to be a model, when models are really just a “thing” used to sell. When young girls see models on TV or in a magazine, they are seeing beautiful, air-brushed, computer altered women, who are actually not real. But since many girls believe that they need to look like those models, it’s making them have very poor self-image.

"The cult of the selfie celebrates regular people," says Pamela Rutledge, Ph.D., faculty director of the media psychology program at the Massachusetts School of Professional Psychology.

"There are many more photographs available now of real people than models." And posting selfies is an empowering act for another reason: It allows you to control your image online.

But let's be real: The most common selfie is the one where you look cute, partially because it's a quick way to get positive comments about your appearance. "If I feel pretty, I take one," says Maryland native Paris, 23. "When other people Like it, it's a mini boost of confidence.

"Simulacra and Simulation" breaks the sign-order into 4 stages: The first stage is a faithful image/copy, where we believe, and it may even be correct, that a sign is a "reflection of a profound reality" (pg 6), this is a good appearance, in what Baudrillard called "the sacramental order". The second stage is perversion of reality, this is where we come to believe the sign to be an unfaithful copy, which "masks and denatures" reality as an "evil appearance—it is of the order of maleficence". Here, signs and images do not faithfully reveal reality to us, but can hint at the existence of an obscure reality which the sign itself is incapable of encapsulating. The third stage masks the absence of a profound reality, where the simulacrum pretends to be a faithful copy, but it is a copy with no original. Signs and images claim to represent something real, but no representation is taking place and arbitrary images are merely suggested as things which they have no relationship to. Baudrillard calls this the "order of sorcery", a regime of semantic algebra where all human meaning is conjured artificially to appear as a reference to the (increasingly) hermetic truth. The fourth stage is pure simulation, in which the simulacrum has no relationship to any reality whatsoever. Here, signs merely reflect other signs and any claim to reality on the part of images or signs is only of the order of other such claims. This is a regime of total equivalency, where cultural products need no longer even pretend to be real in a naïve sense, because the experiences of consumers' lives are so predominantly artificial that even claims to reality are expected to be phrased in artificial, "hyperreal" terms. Any naïve pretension to reality as such is perceived as bereft of critical self-awareness, and thus as oversentimental.

added: "The attention to physical attributes may be even more dangerous on social media than on traditional media because participants in social media are people we know.

A preoccupation with weight and shape was one of the key features of current popular culture, and was a global phenomenon, she said

"The fascination with celebrities, their bodies, clothes and appearance has all increased the pressure that people typically feel at a time when they seek to establish their own identities and when their bodies are growing and changing," she said