Nordplus 2014

 Essay from Iceland

Impact of social media on young people.

One of the main concern that people have now a days is the way they look. People are constantly thinking about if they pass the standards which they are taught to live up to in this society. But who is it that makes those standards?

The media has the power. They control what is noticeable in the society at each time. What will always be in the media are discussions about looks, TV shows about looks, commercials related to what is preferable to look like and so on. We see millions of commercials related to looking good. No one can tell us this commercial don’t have an impact on people. Because stereotypes of what people should look like are stuck in peoples mind.

What lies behind most of it is an illusion. For an example Photoshop, which is used to fix photos. All the covers we see on magazines are fixed so there’s a big different between the original photo and the one we are shown. This gives us a very unrealistic ideas of what we should look like.

Since these stereotypes live among us all. It’s often forgotten that what we see is not necessarily what is real. All music videos today and photos in magazines are fixed so anybody could be beautiful of the opinion of most people. it’s also a shock to people to look at photos of celebrity where they are not photoshopped and just living a normal life, they look just like any one of us but are considered ugly by the society.

Advertisers try to sell us the most. It’s a fact that nudity sells and advertisers use that a lot in commercials. For an example we have an advertise for snow equipment. As you can see the woman in the photo is not wearing appropriate clothes to be skiing. Is this what we want our future generations to be born into? There’s just one answer, we must change the way we sexualize people and show more realistic images of us in the media.