Is social media defining self-worth?

Do you think that social media is changing how people form their identity? And if so, in what ways?

Meghna Singhal: Yes, absolutely. I think social media is not just a platform anymore. It has become a mirror and, sometimes, like a magnifying glass, I think, which judges young people and the way they are seen and shaped and scrutinised. Identity formation is such an important process that happens at this stage, but the problem is that identity is no longer being formed in the quiet privacy of our bedrooms or classrooms. It is being performed, it is being edited, and it is being posted. The question that many young people are asking is not who I am, but what version of me will get the most approval. That is pretty tricky and scary because the lines between authentic self-expression and a very algorithm-driven self-curation are blurring.

Sannuthi Suresh: I agree. Additionally, we must know that for young people, these are not actually separate. The spheres they are navigating between social media and their own selves and their world, they are all one thing. Unlike for a lot of us who were born and started lives without social media being so inherent in our lives, it is for them and is melded into their daily existence. Of course, it is changing how they form an identity. They are basically being dunked into an arena where everything is about presenting yourself in a certain way, but there are no spaces to be able to reflect or think about what any of this means. So yeah, I think it’s just become melded into their daily existence. So yeah, I worry a lot.

Social media influencers are usually accused of creating this plastic, happy world, where likes and a growing subscriber count are the primary gratification. Is this right?

Meghna Singhal: I think in many cases, yes, this is true. But I wouldn’t say it’s just the influencers who are guilty. I think the entire ecosystem rewards this performance, this show, and punishes vulnerability. A lot of the so-called influencers do play a very high-stakes game, and the algorithm does favour these glossy aesthetics over gritty truth. Even truth doesn’t sell unless it’s packaged right, and that is a very big distortion. So, yes and no — influencers are guilty, but I think it’s the entire ecosystem, and influencers are just a symptom.

Sannuthi Suresh: There are also a lot of child influencers online now. There’s this show right now on Netflix, Bad Influence, which talks of influencers who are children, in some ways, also pushed by their parents to put up different types of content online, including YouTube. Here, primary gratification can become follower count because it’s connected to your parent feeling that if you’re doing well online, it means that you have more followers. I feel it’s even more dangerous when you have an adult who’s using a child to become an influencer. I wouldn’t say that influencers are the only ones guilty of doing this, but everyone is trying to create aspirational versions of the world.

How exactly do these online trends of perfect images influence body image or self-expression, particularly of children and youngsters?

Sannuthi Suresh: I remember this whole trend at one point where thigh gaps were a thing; basically, it was about having really shapely thighs, but also a gap between the two thighs, and this led to a lot of young people wanting to get the thigh gap. And then it moved to some other body feature flaunted by celebrities and influencers.  It was scary for me to see, even when I was speaking to a young person who is a teen, the minuscule attention to their face and the fact that the left side doesn’t match the right side, for instance.

Meghna Singhal: I am reminded of all my adolescent clients, who have a very distorted body image and they’re in therapy because of it. This is also at the core of a whole lot of eating disorders.  They tell me, logically, though they know this is an airbrushed kind of reality, it still influences them. There’s a lot of internalised shame, and what starts off as inspiration becomes very shameful, you know, to them, when they are not able to achieve it. Another trend that caught on was the ‘girl morning routine’, which took over insta reels – promoting rigid schedules and criticised by psychiatrists because it was unrealistic.

Is it possible that children leverage their access to resources to push and achieve this ideal body image?

Sannuthi Suresh: How far will they go?  I don’t think anybody can answer that, but the whole point is that the ideal itself keeps shifting. Someday it’s the thigh gap, and someday it’s that punishing morning routine and someday it’s fruit juice. A few years back, the blue whale challenge went viral, and it was all about completing a series of steps, which ultimately had the player taking their own life. A lot of people were succumbing to it. So, how far will we go? I don’t think there’s an answer to that.

Meghna Singhal: Blue Whale was one of those trends where it kept pushing you to prove that you could be daring, with no one discussing the underlying aspects of insecurity or pain or suffering. None of those were being discussed and are not being discussed. So children are encouraged to present themselves as alpha male or sigma male, and ultra sassy if you are a girl. There is no dialogue, no facilitation, no conversation around what it means to be that, and the implications of this trend.

Can parents keep tabs on the social media use of teens? More importantly, how do they make the right sense of what they’re doing online?

Sannuthi Suresh: The truth is you can’t really keep tabs on the social media use of a teenager. We need to accept that as parents or adults. You don’t have control right now. In Adolescence, you can see the vacuum that these young people are in, with almost no adult conversation in their lives. How has that vacuum been built? I think that’s an important question to ask. Young people are spending a lot of time online today, and I feel there has to be some way to close that vacuum of communication. We are also guilty of dumping young people into this sea of information without giving them any idea about what authoritative information is.  It is about us taking the initiative to talk more, spend more time, and hang out, in general. with them.

Meghna Singhal: I don’t think keeping tabs on the social media use of teens is such a good idea at all; it is a very surveillance kind of perspective. Whereas I think what we need to do is shift from surveillance to establishing a connection. Monitoring social media, when we do that as parents, it comes from a place of fear, and it actually backfires. Because it only encourages the young people to hide what they’re doing online. In fact, what we need is a better, stronger parent-child connection. What we need is parents coming at their children from a place of curiosity and trust because young people speak a very different language, as shown in Adolescence. Also, did you know children have Finsta accounts — fake Instagram accounts — that they keep hidden, we have no idea they use. So, we as parents and educators need to learn their language, listen to the contexts they use it in, and we have to stop translating it into our own fears. A better question to ask may be: What part of you feels most seen when you like a post, or when you share your own post? Having different conversations instead of seeing everything as rebellion is a definite starting point. I think we need to start seeing these young people from their own lens as well, only then will we be able to bridge the gap.

Listen to the conversation in The Hindu Parley podcast