Problem:
In the world today, filled with technology in every corner, you can never get away from it. This is especially true in two major categories; someone’s social life and businesses. No matter your age, you are somehow connected to others via technology, specifically through social media. Whether it’s through Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, you are connected. Now you might ask yourself, what if I am on none of those platforms? I’m not using social media then. If you have email, then you are using a type of media to stay socially connected with someone, therefore you are using social media. No matter what you are sharing on your accounts, you’re still connected and it’s still apart of your life.
When it comes to businesses, having social media to stay connected has now become essential to survive as a company. Through social media, you are easily able to do that. You can put your products out there and get people’s reactions before you put it on the market. You are also able to connect with your customers, this way the customer has a more personal feeling toward the company. The most important part of businesses on social media is the numbers. The number of followers, the number of likes and comments or engagement, this is how a company can tell if something is going well or if they should work with an influencer to get their product to more people.
The overlap between these two aspects of social media, personal life, and business, is a pretty negative one. While it is important for businesses to know numbers, this knowledge causes a lot of mental health within people. For this project, I will be focusing on the relationship between mental health and social media, while making sure the business aspect of social media doesn’t get too affected. Specifically, I will look at Instagram and the younger generation of Instagram users (25 and younger). This problem is important to me because I am someone who falls within the age range I am looking at and also someone who is an avid Instagram user, with mental health problems. But I am also someone who is currently running two Instagram accounts for two different businesses, so I understand the importance of keeping the business aspect of Instagram.
Context:
My choice to focus on Instagram came easy to me after doing my research. It was found that Instagram is the worst social media platform when it comes to mental health, out of the top platforms (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat and Youtube). In 2017, the BBC surveyed young people ages 14-24, they asked 1,479 of them to rank the top 5 social media apps based off of current issues that face their generation such as anxiety, depression, loneliness, bullying, body image and fear of missing out. The results are displayed in the bar graph below.
This graph shows that Instagram has the most negative impact on youth who use the platform, whereas YouTube has the most positive.
From my personal experience, I was not shocked when I saw this. On Instagram, you are only able to post images. This means that whatever you look like in those images is how you will be judged, based on likes and your followers. These numbers make it extremely easy to compare yourself to others. You might feel really good about the way you look in a picture but then you see someone else posting a bikini picture, someone who doesn’t look anything like you and then you see how many more likes and comments she is getting. Your mind automatically goes to the “you’re not pretty enough” or “you’ll never look like that” or “you need to look like that to get as many likes” or “if only you looked as good as she did, then maybe you would be happier.” These are the thoughts that run through our minds every time we are on Instagram, even if we don’t know it. Although we don’t like to admit it, every aspect of our life has the aspect of, what will this look like on Instagram or how can I show off that I am doing this. We all want to be better than each other, to prove we are cooler or having more fun than the other. This creates a very toxic environment and the numbers side of Instagram is only fueling the fire.
Tech:
Like I explained above, I want to re-design Instagram. I’ve already touched on the reason I picked Instagram over the other apps and my personal experiences with it and overall I’ve had made it seem like a pretty negative app. So let me mention some of the benefits to it, besides the business aspect, for an everyday user because hopefully, this will explain why we shouldn’t just get rid of it altogether.
Pros:
- Provides a sense of belonging
- Increases bonding while decreasing loneliness
- Makes us happy and spreads it to others
- Reconnects people
- Creates a sense of closeness
- Positively affects how people manage their health
Those were some of the pros of having Instagram for personal use. Not to mention the pros that businesses would have an Instagram like marketing, branding, and advertising. For me, it is hard to see the cons of having an Instagram for personal use because I am so caught up in the world of Instagram and have been since 7th grade. In the back of my mind, I knew that it wasn’t the best for me and it was some of the causes of my depression and anxiety and self-hate, but I never knew the exact reasons. Doing this project and doing this research has helped me understand the specifics of the negativity.
Cons:
- Creates the need for a fake life
- Increases feelings of inadequacy and loneliness
- Causes depression and anxiety
- Makes face to face conversations more difficult
- Leads to eating disorders
- Brings out jealousy
- Decreases empathy
Some of these cons have to do with who you follow, what pictures are recommended to you and what pictures you see, such as “creates the need for a fake life”. Many people will make their lives seem perfect on Instagram to get more likes or followers. Also, “makes face to face conversations more difficult” has to do with the fact that the younger generation is too caught up in their phones and they don’t interact with each other in person as much. This means that when they do interact in person, they don’t have as much practice so it makes everything uncomfortable. Another con, “leads to eating disorders” has to do with the people someone follows and the pictures someone might see, but it also has to do with the numbers. For example, if a young girl, sees a picture of an influencer who is a size 0 get a lot of likes on a picture of her, then this girl will think that what she needs to do in order to get a lot of likes, which intern means social acceptance, is that she needs to lose weight, even if she needs to or not. But when you are young, all you want is for that to happen fast, so you stop eating because you know that that will help you lose weight fast. This then leads into the depression you develop because you don’t look like that influence who’s a size 0 and now you have an eating disorder. The whole Instagram world is a snowball that starts at an extremely young age and it all has to do with the numbers.
Values:
The whole point of Instagram is to post pictures. The original goal was to have it be pictures of whatever you wanted, whatever you felt like sharing that day. But over the years, with celebrates and people getting jealous and competitive, it hasn’t been like that. There are some unspoken rules to Instagram that create a negative environment that it has become. One of those rules is that you can’t post more than once a day. This is not an Instagram rule but it’s just a rule that society made up because they would get annoyed with people who kept posting. Another unspoken rule is that you can’t post too many food pictures, or any at all, without being labeled as basic or a typical Instagrammer. Both of those words have negative connotations around them. There are many other unspoken rules that most young people try to follow but the missing value, getting back to the original goal of Instagram, is acceptance. That’s all people want is to feel accepted. If our society can bring back acceptance into the Instagram culture, and aspects of our culture, then that would be a major step in the right direction for us.
Redesign:
A recurring thing that I have been saying is “it’s all about the numbers” or “that’s based off the numbers.” There is no doubt that the numbers are the biggest issue within Instagram. Having the ability to see how many likes your friends’ post has or how many followers they have and then compare it to your own, is what fuels most, if not all, of the negativity that surrounds Instagram. If the numbers weren’t there that would solve everyone’s issue, right?
This is where we get in trouble with the businesses. I’ve explained how important Instagram is to companies and businesses, and the reason why it’s so important is because of the numbers. It’s an easy way to measure. The picture below is from the official Instagram Business website.
This infographic breaks down how large the audience is on a typical Instagram business account. These numbers are the reason why having an Instagram account for your business is so important. That is why it’s so important for businesses to be able to know the numbers within Instagram so they know how their product is doing or who is researching them or what influencers are popular and have the correct amount of engagement. So with taking away all of the numbers within Instagram, the businesses would have to find another way to promote their products and this would most likely be more ads within Instagram.
Instead, how I would redesign it does not show the number of likes a post gets to the public but allow the person who posted it to be able to see it. By doing this, you avoid a person seeing a picture and then comparing the fact that they got more likes than their post got. But also, the person would know how their posts are doing. This could create a sense of acceptance because it would get rid of the comparison aspect of Instagram. The one thing that this doesn’t solve is the Instagrammer would still be able to know how many likes they are getting from post to post. This can still create some comparison issues within their posts. My redesign to improve this is to have an option in the settings to turn off all displays of likes. This means that if you turned it off, you wouldn’t be able to see how many people liked it or who liked it or anything. That way, there is no wondering or guessing as to why one post didn’t get as many likes as the other or why someone didn’t like your post. I would keep the comments and the number of comments on there because the comments section is a good way to promote the community aspect of Instagram.
For businesses, companies, and brands, not being able to see the displayed likes on a post could mess up their business deals and overall workflow of the business, as I have explained previously. To fix this, I would design a password system. Essentially, the business would have to apply, through Instagram, to obtain this password. The application is just to confirm that they are a real business and are looking to get these numbers for business deals. Once the password is obtained, any account that they went on, there would be a button that they could press that would allow them to enter the password. Once they did that, they would be able to see the likes and engagement within each post.
Although my solutions do not solve all of the issues that are present within the Instagram community regarding mental health. I believe I have created the best alternative to lessen mental health issues or the cons of Instagram, while also keeping in mind the important marketing aspect of Instagram. It’s important we as a society take a step back every once in a while to see if what we are doing is creating a positive impact on ourselves because it is unrealistic to believe that Instagram or any type of social media will be going away anytime soon. So we must always be creating the best possible versions of them, not only for ourselves but for the generations of kids who will never know a time before technology.
References:
https://childmind.org/article/is-social-media-use-causing-depression/
https://www.allpsychologyschools.com/psychology/social-media-psychology/
http://later.com/blog/hidden-likes-instagram/
https://time.com/4793331/instagram-social-media-mental-health/
https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/instagram-ranked-worst-for-mental-health-in-teen-survey/
http://chartoftheday_19262_impact_of_social_media_on_mental_health_n.jpg
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