Instagram as Brain Imaging for Society

So, you’ve probably heard the buzz. When teen girls engage with Instagram, it may affect their self-image and self-esteem.

My question is this:

If we lived in a society where young females were loved, appreciated, encouraged, and supplied with the means for positive personal development, would being trashed by peers or encountering ‘perfect’ females on social media have the same effect?

I don’t think so.

I’ve written before about how humans blame a particular someone for some problem if we can get our hands around their necks. We can get our hands around Mr. Zuckerberg’s neck. We can’t get our hands around society’s neck.

Full disclosure, I grew up as a female and I received all the standard messages about why I was deformed, malformed, and destined for servitude due to my many shortcomings from religion, educators, and certainly any other human I came in contact with (both female and male). I was born in 1956, well before any online messages could affect my self-image or self-efficacy. So, I don’t believe Instagram or other social media are the sources of female dysfunction. It is a historical FACT that females have been encouraged to hate themselves and other females for as long as we have records.

Recall, we can only solve a problem if we can identify its source.

Instagram is like a medical image that shows us where our society is diseased. We should look and learn.

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This post was previously published on medium.com.

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