The article by Alava and Chauoni explains how social media can foster unrealistic expectations that lead to societal pressure about looks for young girls. Through beauty standards promoted by influencer culture through modes like filters and photo editing, it normalizes young girls to negative comparison that can affect their self-esteem and body satisfaction. Filters and editing apps create a hyperreality where it makes it difficult for young girls to understand what is reality and what is an altered reality. When this surrounds body image, it can create difficult relationships with young girls and their self-esteem. Influencer culture and the likes and comments they receive act as a validation metric that ties self-worth to appearance-based approval. When young girls see a certain body type or look associated with societal approval, it creates an underlying problem related to their body satisfaction. These young girls then internalize narrow beauty ideals, which leads to pressure to modify their own bodies to fit in; this can be done through filters, photo editing, and even surgery.
This is an extremely important article related to my research, as the relationship between hyperreal expressions of looks in influencer culture is directly related to the hyperreal creation of beauty standards. Young girls already normalize and get a taste of these standards in toys like Barbies and Bratz dolls. When they grow up and see influencer culture, they internalize even more societal expectations to look a certain way. As they continue to develop emotionally in this society, they internalize the idea that the hyperreal beauty standards are reality standards for women’s looks. This leads to changing face and body looks digitally using filters and editing apps, but it can even further lead to surgeries to make these hyperrealistic standards a reality.
Some of the feedback I received from my preproduction binder workshop was regarding the number of people I will be interviewing, whether I’m going to keep my voice in for the interview questions, whether I am going to add b-roll, and how this relates to my overall research points. With this feedback, I have decided that I am going to do a video essay and try to complete it fully without any interviews moving forward. This means that I am going to rely mainly on b-roll footage and a script explaining my research and findings. My voice will be the narration instead of the person asking questions, and if I do decide to interview 1 or 2 people in the end, I will keep my voice in asking the questions so that it flows with the prior narration.