This article on Psychology today talks about the affect that photo-altering services, like filters and editing, harm our opinions about our own body image. Because it can be hard to differentiate between a real image and an edited image, many people tend to conclude that these images are real, when instead, I think we should do more as a society to question images we see on social media sites and the internet in general. New and unrealistic beauty standards are being enforced on our society, which can cause many to consider going through real-life body and face alterations. Continuing off this, we have seen a spike in plastic surgeries within the younger generations.

When it comes to mental health issues in our generation, I can say with almost 100% confidence, that social media is the main culprit. With technology integrated in every aspect of our lives nowadays, we can blame social media for being so easily accessible and influential on our generation and generations to come. From my experiences, many social media sites encourage people to really only showcase the good aspects of our lives, which leaves a very one-sided angle of everyone. This is very harmful as many younger people (and probably older people too) tend to compare themselves to the influencers and accounts, leading to accelerating conditions like depression, anxiety, and jealousy. Additionally, with all these way to edit photos, these posts may not even be real but they sure seem real, leading to negative self body image thoughts and unhealthy diet and workout plans. I think in some ways social media can be good for your mental health, whether that is watching funny videos to lighten the mood, or looking into what other people with similar hobbies do to mimic and get inspiration. However, it is hard to filter out the harmful content with the content with want and enjoy.

After reading through the information in this chapter and my own experiences on social media, I do not think I would want something I said to go viral. Once some piece of information linked to you goes viral, it is very hard to hide away and be yourself as many people tailor their posts to please others. I would rather just be a nobody and have my friends and family view my posts and statements. Maybe if I did something cool, like one of my many international trips and physical challenging adventures, that would be awesome, but I also feel like so many people do those thrilling things and not enough people get credit for it.

Funny enough, I found this source to be quite insightful. Because I grew up in the age where the image emoticons were coming to light, people shied away from typing out the character-version using keyboard characters. Because of this, I never learned what some of them meant (i.e., D:< which means horror or disgust). Therefore, I was able to look and use this as a key for typing and texting out emojis. I also learned that they all face the same way, as they all should be rotated counter-clockwise 90 degrees to view. Wonder how that was decided on!