While media (i.e. magazines) has been looked at as influential in creating a distorted perception of what beauty is, the power of media, specifically social media platforms such as Instagram has intensified. No longer is it about not buying the latest magazine to escape the presence of beauty standards, but the inundation of social media over our everyday lives plays a factor in perpetuating a thin ideal, especially for teenage girls (or women at any age) with eating disorders like #ana whose perception of themselves is severely altered through social media platforms. For example, in April of 2013 a local news website in Richmond, Virgina reported about the hash tags going viral. This report is particularly telling because the featured twenty-year old woman said, “working through daily body confidence issues is made challenging by blogs and other social media that host information about severe weight loss through bingeing, purging or fasting.” In a video that was included with the report the young woman continued, “It was really, really hard to stop looking at those tags and get myself away from Tumblr or Twitter”. On the part of social media, a year ago Instagram updated its guidelines to restrict “accounts, images, or hashtags dedicated to glorifying, promoting, or encouraging self-harm” that included “encouraging or urging users to embrace anorexia, bulimia, or other eating disorders”. In addition, these updated guidelines included a link to the National Eating Disorders Association where users can go to get help. This meant that users could no longer use hash tags that “actively promote self-harm, such as “thinspiration,” “probulimia,” and “proanorexia".
The process of this project has left me with more questions that are beyond the scope of this project. As I went through the photos and videos I never encountered teenage girls of color and I wondered why? Are teenage girls of color without #ana ? Are they ashamed of posting? Why are teenager girls of color with #ana not participating in the hash tagging or video posting? Does accessibility to technology such as a smart phone or computer have to do with the invisibility of teens of color contributing? What are the experiences of men with #ana? How are men with #ana affected by social media? Why was it only teenage girls if this affects people of all age? Through the process of collecting and seeing I found myself emotionally drained and overwhelmed. It broke down my psyche a bit, I kept asking myself, "how could anyone hate their body so much?" Especially when it came to looking at the photos on Instagram and realizing that over the course of this project the number of #ana photos had only grown and that one of the videos I had selected to use had disappeared from one day to another. Had this user relapsed? I set out to examine these two social media communities as texts of visual culture and digital stories and it is difficult to conclude by saying that my work here is "done". That I can tie this conclusion up with a nice little bow when all I have done is glanced at someone's lived-experience for a few seconds. As Phoebe said in her video, "these 2-3 minutes does not sum up half events that all the people around me experienced in the last year or so".
The process of this project has left me with more questions that are beyond the scope of this project. As I went through the photos and videos I never encountered teenage girls of color and I wondered why? Are teenage girls of color without #ana ? Are they ashamed of posting? Why are teenager girls of color with #ana not participating in the hash tagging or video posting? Does accessibility to technology such as a smart phone or computer have to do with the invisibility of teens of color contributing? What are the experiences of men with #ana? How are men with #ana affected by social media? Why was it only teenage girls if this affects people of all age? Through the process of collecting and seeing I found myself emotionally drained and overwhelmed. It broke down my psyche a bit, I kept asking myself, "how could anyone hate their body so much?" Especially when it came to looking at the photos on Instagram and realizing that over the course of this project the number of #ana photos had only grown and that one of the videos I had selected to use had disappeared from one day to another. Had this user relapsed? I set out to examine these two social media communities as texts of visual culture and digital stories and it is difficult to conclude by saying that my work here is "done". That I can tie this conclusion up with a nice little bow when all I have done is glanced at someone's lived-experience for a few seconds. As Phoebe said in her video, "these 2-3 minutes does not sum up half events that all the people around me experienced in the last year or so".