How Might the Media Influence Self-Esteem and Body Image?

How might the media influence self-esteem and body image?

As we have been talking in the previous topics, media does impact hugely on our perspectives on nearly everything; we are in a media driven world where we are heavily exposed under all sorts of media channels; television, movies, prints, advertisements, internet and other resources that deeply influence our values. Self-esteem is about how people value themselves; people who have a high self-esteem tend to be more confident in them, make them easier to make connection with others and can relatively obtain more happiness in terms of life. Body image is how someone feels about its own physical appearance; study shows that there is a strong connection between self-esteem and body image, particularly to those who are in their teenage. This is mainly because people tend to care about what other look of them when they are developing in their teenage.

We tend to compare ourselves and people around us with significant information and images we receive; and there is no doubt media has been feeding us a considerable amount of images on appearance. However, those message about appearance from media these days often emphasizing the idea of ‘skinniness’ and ‘flawlessness;’ their definitions of beauty are usually narrowed, restricting to a very limited impression on how beautiful people should look like. They portray beauty with celebrities’ and artificial images on the front page of magazines, in TVs, in advertisements; they send out public message that “if you do not look like this then you are not good enough.” These influences have huge impacts on the audience, making them to compare themselves with unrealistic target; when self-esteem is lashed and people don’t feel good about themselves anymore, all their concerns will be how to achieve the perfection media has been feeding us. But whose fault is this?