The technology expansion is widespread throughout the globe, effecting to the era when smartphone ownership is one of the priority parts in the primary human needs. Over decades, the needs of owning smartphones had changed, keeping up in the modernized era, where sophisticated digital technology become an emphasis part of human life. Possession of the latest gadgets has been upgraded from the tertiary needs to the primary needs. In the digital technology industry, there is a phenomenon that happens through the years, when all gadget brands around the world compete for each other in releasing the new version of smartphones respectively. Introducing the latest features, expand the life of screen usage and the improvement of the camera quality, supported by the various range of prices and the board enticing advertisements, smartphones become more appealing and affordable to the society among ages and wealth.
The emerge of smartphone ownership had changed the aim of the telephone for as communication tools. Transforming the basic text messages and calls, phones evolved and became compulsory with many leading features that bolster and facilitate human's social life in one hand. Application enhancements in the smartphone, facilitate everyone to connect and communicate with everyone around the globe without boundaries and introduce a new form of communication. Creating prodigious intercommunications that build in the huge social networking through social media apps.
As a living human, our species tend to adapt easily to fit within their surroundings. In this particular case, we adapt to the modern digital era, which is no longer the infancy age. Through the latest communication technology, which refers to social media. It became the daily needs of the entertainment and pleasure besides as the current communicating tools with the extensive platforms to acquainted, communicate, connect, unify, socialize with everyone across the globe with no boundaries, among groups of ages, countries and race, languages and cultures. Build the new social life within the network and created a huge social networking that continuously to grow rapidly throughout the last few years and becoming a part of the biggest industry that covered many life platforms including business, research, education and the interpersonal connection in the present world. Continuously with their developments, social networking unceasingly offering their users new features and various options in the newly updated apps, as a way to engage their users for increasing the time-consuming on social media.
Social networking has changed the way we live, which had a massive impact on society. The rise of social media has opened the door for us as a global population to more connected at anytime and anywhere than we have ever been in the history of time to access and permeate an immense information, which had the ability for everyone to rely on it every hour of their lives. It is a fact that social media covered a wide range of factors for keeping the users to spend a lot of times on it. Imagine how much time that they spend on smartphones and dragged into the imaginary colorful screen on social media apps. Unconsciously they keep scrolling into everyone's personal life and sending thousands of texts, images or/and videos for hours without realizing how much time wasted which can reduce our productivity. The excitement to keep updating their personal’s life, story and photos on Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, sending tweets on Twitter, instant messaging on WhatsApp, Line, and Telegram, they shift their personal on the network where it can be accessed for everyone, and anywhere. From the relatives that close to you, an old friend or even the strangers or stalkers who want to pry others' personal lives. The curiosity to know others leads them to be trapped for a long time on social media. The length of consumption on social media that are too frequently alongside with the amount of time spent on social media unconsciously affecting to human mentally and emerge the feeling of unhappy, depress and isolated. The implication of the human’s mental health issues leads to individual’s feeling of self-worth and self-esteem towards the body image. It is how they judge themselves in their mind on the mirror. “Surveyed almost 1,500 young people aged 14 to 24 on how certain social media platforms impact health and well-being issues such as anxiety, depression, self-identity and body image.” (Fox, 17)
Body
• Social media as a platform for photo-sharing and profiling
In recent years, there have been a huge change on social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube. At its early age, social media was used solely for entertainment, fun, and pleasure for a short moment of break. Social media created as an open public platform that allows everyone to create accounts for free and it was considered as a platform for the users to liberally share anything through their posting. It had formerly operated as a commonplace for post recent photos, activities, feelings and thoughts, or as an expression of himself/herself to expose the momentous occasions and moments that happen within our live. However, as time goes by, the aim of social media use had changed dramatically as it is as an extension our ourselves. It positioned itself as a great inhibitor on everyone’s freewill. However, the high demand is still happening among age groups and generations.
There was no one has ever gotten judged or valued by the embedded embarrassing and silly photos, videos or thoughts based on what they have seen on the profile. The association and connection between users have not been a vast expanse if compared to today’s circumstances. The followers were finite for the close groups of friends, families and relatives. So that evoked the users to independently sharing and posting anything they want without getting insecure and anxiety of the valuation from strangers. People were more familiar with face to face contact and evaluate someone from the decent encounter and introduction. There is not immediately evolving in one night to reach the peak and positioned itself to become the immense platform. It has been a gradually increase to merge the connections between users from time to time for years. Coincided with the sophisticated digital technology, social media established as a base to presenting the user’s identity. Open the opportunity for everyone to reinvent themselves, through uploaded photos and keep updating the daily hustle and bustle of the day and the casual activity at night to perceived attractiveness and make a form of relationships with other users. In addition, the major users’ evolution on social media is the pursuit to brand themselves. “These new developments in social media are directly responsible for the disconnect between mind and body.” (Adkins, 2018)
The advanced transform of social media that changed it into a profession and was reborn as the medium for personal branding and profiling for their identity to represent themselves inside the social networks. Creating ideal profiling on social media refers as a strictly necessary to ensure the satisfaction of the adolescent society demands in this particular generation. Every posted photo must be fully qualified through the intimidating airbrushing and photo editing by adding filters that harmonized the theme, image quality checking and finalized with the nice caption of quotes. Profile feeds have become an overly tortured platform in which people post to seek approval from the viewers by meeting societal standards of self-image.
Social media completely transform not just the society but also the fashion and business industry. The perfect profiling rules also apply to get the job offers in a certain field of work. Models, celebrities, social influencer and content creator are some examples of profession that experiencing the impact of social media profiling and followers on getting the jobs in their daily basis. They are required to frequently upload their flawless photos to construct the impeccable standards of profiling themselves in order to gain more followers and profiles visits every day as a piece of effort of getting jobs. In the interview with Independent online magazine, with the headline of “Models can’t get jobs without telling companies how many followers they have”, the 35 years old Russian supermodel, Natalia Vodianova admitted that models are struggling to get jobs if they do not have hefty social media followings. “The rising influence of social media has seen a far greater emphasis on personality over beauty since the industry.” (Oppenheim, 2018) Clients will seek through the models’ social media profile before determining to offer the contract for a single shoot. The model with the most followers, who has bigger social presence will definitely win the offer. Furthermore, social media become the leading profitable industry for the users, the rise of social media celebrity across Western and Asian culture, or known as ‘celebrgam’, the instance name in the society, for instance, Kim Kardashian (@kimkardashian), Jenn Im (@imjennim), Alexis Ren (@alexisren) , Lily May Mac (@lilymaymac), creating contents on their social media as brand marketers to acquaint and promote the products by the contracted brands. They come from many different cultures and countries and became the perfect figure on social media with the specific body ideal through their posted stories and photos on Instagram, tweeted of thoughts on Twitter and supported by the uploaded videos on their YouTube channel, create the consummate profiling. It is considered as a place with the most visited by the adolescent when they open their social media and stalk for lengthy periods, quest for their personal’s life post. No wonder how our generation has the obsession of the ideology of perfection of body and appearance.
The duration of time consuming on social media is continuously increase over the years. The delight of stalking people’s aesthetic profiling and photos responsible for the current issue of imprisoned themselves on social media fantasy. According to the last survey in January 2017, Social Media Today found the teenage time consuming on social media approximately up to nine hours per day. Compared to adults spending is nearly to two hours. People at the ages of 15 – 27 are actively more engaged in many the forms of social media. The significant time consuming differences of each age groups attest that social media is effectively addressed to adolescent, the time when they are facing puberty labile issue for seeking and earning approval for their identity and appearance to fit in their society. The define age when getting compared to the peers or/and others is a common occur thing. Social media can aggravate their perceived flaws that leads to the feeling of self-doubt, especially after hours of seemingly aesthetically pictures on feeds loaded by peers, social media celebrities and model. “These platforms are to blame for instilling insecurities in young people” (Adkins, 2018)
Valuing the data from social media to determine their own sense of self-esteem from the number of followers and likers they get is the major consequence of unhealthy relationship between the human being and their social media profiling. The addiction of getting likes, profiles visits and receive new followers in which case preserve to satisfied, proudly and comfort of them,