Digital Health Campaigns: Body Modification and Cosmetic Surgery on Visual Social Media
Instagram affords its more than one billion active monthly users (Statista 2019), an immersive and visually rich platform for creating and presenting a personal brand identity. Typically, these online identities are moulded around notions of an ideal self and lifestyle. Users tend to display content that is socially desirable or valuable, such as practicing yoga, spending time with friends, or eating healthily (Aires 2020). Other users within the platform aren’t merely an audience to this content - but play an active role in the perpetuation of idealised and celebrity lifestyles through ‘engagement marketing’ and reproduction of content as ‘prosumers’ (Zhang 2015).
On the platform, a user’s persona or identity becomes a tangible entity entangled in a commitment to deploying and maintaining this entity as if it were a real branded good to be traded (Senft 2013). The form that these entities take are influenced by cultural factors and aesthetics vying for attention, where the labour and time necessary to generate these being unpaid (Drenten, Gurrieri & Tyler 2018). Through this labour, close consideration is paid to grabbing attention through a ‘sex sells’; ‘porn chic’ aesthetic, particularly promoting products alongside sexualised women (Blair et al. 2006; Drenten, Gurrieri & Tyler 2018).
With the popularity of visual platforms such as Instagram, many are left vulnerable to content which is left unchecked and uncensored. Users are exposed to unrealistic aesthetic templates – with these altering real life perceptions even in the offline world (Marwick 2015). Dorfman (2017) argue that it is critical that board certified surgeons increase their presence on social media. This is to educate and inform users about the real-world risks and implications of undergoing plastic surgery to conform to these aesthetic templates. As with many social media platforms, they are still in their relative infancy. Currently, Instagram – like others, are an online ‘Wild West’. There must continue to be those within and outside these platforms actively speaking out and keeping the capabilities of the platforms themselves in check.
References:
Aires, S 2020, ‘Laboured Identity: An Analysis of User Branding Practices on Instagram’, tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society, vol. 18, no. 1, pp. 494-507.
Blair, J, Stephensen, J, Hill, K & Green, J 2006, ‘Ethics in advertising: sex sells, but should it?’, Journal of Legal, Ethical and Regulatory Issues, vol. 9, no. 1, p. 109.
Dorfman, R, Vaca, E, Mahmood, E, Fine, N & Schierle, C 2017, ‘Plastic Surgery-Related Hashtag Utilization on Instagram: Implications for Education and Marketing’, Aesthetic Surgery Journal, vol. 38, no. 3, pp. 332-338.
Drenten, J, Gurrieri, L & Tyler, M 2018, ‘Sexualized labour in digital culture: Instagram influencers, porn chic and the monetization of attention’, Gender, Work & Organization, vol. 27, no. 1, pp. 41-66.
Marwick, A 2015, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Yale University Press, New Haven.
Senft, T 2013, ‘Microcelebrity and the Branded Self’, A Companion to New Media Dynamics, in J Hartley, J Burgess & A Bruns (ed.), Wiley‐Blackwell, Oxford, UK, pp. 346-354.
Statista 2019, Number of monthly active Instagram users from January 2013 to June 2018, viewed 30 May 2020, <https://www.statista.com/statistics/253577/number-of-monthly-active-instagram-users/>.
Zhang, L 2015, ‘Fashioning the feminine self in “prosumer capitalism”: Women's work and the transnational reselling of Western luxury online’, Journal of Consumer Culture, vol. 17, no. 2, pp. 184-204.
