Body Image Concerns in Adolescents: The Impact and Influence of Social Media on Students’ Body Images and Its Remedies

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Body Image Concerns in Adolescents: The Impact and Influence of Social Media on Students’ Body Images and Its Remedies
As the mass media and the social media have become the essential tools to become socialized with people, body image concerns in adolescents have become critical problems regarding eating disorders such as anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa, or body dissatisfaction. The mass media and the social media provide a gateway for women to seek out beautiful images of what they want to be like, a site for women – especially adolescents – to search for diet procedures and exercise routines, as well as a generator through which female adolescents can imitate outfit to their idolized stars and celebrities.
Female body images and the idolized images of feminine beauty are distorted and portrayed by the mass media and the social media such as news, magazines, television and Facebook. Social media – such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram – has made consistent the possibility to argue and analyze bodies in such a way that promotes eating disorders and body dissatisfaction. Tiggemann and Slaster assert, “Sociocultural theory, contends that the current inordinately thin beauty ideal for women is transmitted by a number of sociocultural influences, of which the media are the most persuasive and powerful” (630). Today, as the mass media and the social media become easier to access for the adolescents and the students to a new world of the digital media, rates of having eating disorders among adolescents are increasing and possibility of the danger of having stereotypes about the thinness body images are constantly rising. According to Smolak’s research data, “By adolescence, perhaps 70% of girls want to be thinner. Typically, stu...

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...Harcourt. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012. 128-135. Print.
The National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Associated Disorders. Web. http://www.anad.org/get-information/about-eating-disorders/eating-disorders-statistics/
The National Institute of Mental Health. “Eating Disorders.” 2011. Web. http://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/eating-disorders/eating-disorders.pdf
Tiggermann, Marika and Amy Slaster. “Net Girls: The Internet, Facebook, and Body Image Concern in Adolescent Girls.” International Journal of Eating Disorders 46.6, 630-633, 2013. Print.
Vonderen, Kristen E. Van and William Kinnally. “Media Effects on Body Image: Examining Media Exposure in the Broader Context of Internal and Other Social Factors.” American Communication Journal 14.2, 41-53, 2012.
Wykes, Maggie and Barrie Gunter. The Media & Body Image: If Looks Could Kill. London: Sage P, 1987. Print.

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