Sally Abel
Claremont McKenna College, Media Studies
Idealized Happiness: Redefining Social Media Use.
Modern social media use has created a space where social media has become a place for self-branding and self-promotion. This has resulted in the constant flow of idealized self-representations across social media platforms as users boast what they perceive to be desirable moments of their lives that embody social ideals of happiness. Changing the ways in which younger generations are using social media is paramount to lessening the impact that social media is having on society and mental health. If people cared less about highlighting their best moments and instead focussed on presenting a more realistic self-representation on social media, the toxic environment found across social media platforms could perhaps be lessened and created into a safer space. In an effort to critique contemporary use of social media, I have created an instagram page, @xnotgivingax, that aims to rearrange, reimagine, and refocus interpretations of happiness. I executed my critique by pulling instagram photos from mine and my friends instagram pages (with their permission) that I felt were representative of the ways in which young people today use social media, and then altering these photos in ways that highlighted the idealized representation of happiness that they were portraying.