Social media: it's all a lie

The poster on the wall of my high school English classroom read: "Perfection is a myth."

As a mildly awkward overachiever, this sentiment always struck a chord with my teenage self. And as a less awkward (hopefully) twenty-something, this sentence continues to resonate more than a decade later.

But there are days when those four words could not appear farther from the truth. Scrolling through the likes of Instagram, Facebook and Twitter, it is easy to get caught up in the "perfection" that appears to exist in everyone's life but your own.

Just ask Essena O'Neill. At 12 years old, she coveted the well-defined abs, slim thighs and idyllic existences of the women she saw online. And by 18, the Australian model had become that person she so dearly wanted to be. Pictures and videos of O'Neill's food and fashion choices had amassed the teen roughly 580 000 Instagram followers and 260 000 subscribers to her YouTube channel.

By all accounts, the social media sensation had realised the success many aspire to. But just this week, she launched an all-out war against the fabricated and inauthentic world of social media. A world she had become a slave to.

In a 17-minute video, O'Neill details how she isn't against social sharing or social media per se but rather wants to bring about a change to the current status of online social networks. Part of her efforts to expose the folly of her sepia-toned holiday snaps saw O'Neill rewriting the captions of some of her 2 000-odd Instagram images to reveal the reality behind the seemingly flawless shot.

In one instance, a bikini-clad O'Neill is perched on a beach towel by the ocean. In the edited caption she describes how she probably took over 100 pictures before settling on one she was happy with and detailed that the only reason her stomach looked so flat was because she hadn't eaten all day. In the video, O'Neill also outlines how she was paid by brands to wear many of the clothes featured on her various social media accounts.

"I have a whole career built around social media," said O'Neill, admitting the system she now loathes has been her meal ticket for several years. "I was the girl that 'had it all'. I was surrounded by all this wealth, fame and power but all of these people were miserable. And I had never been more miserable."

O'Neill's efforts to bring about a change in the nature of online communities and society's obsession with unrealistic standards have gone viral. And she isn't the only one championing this movement.

It wasn't long after her revelations that fellow social celebrity and personal trainer Kayla Itsines took to Instagram to outline just how much time and effort it takes to create a single "perfect" shot.

Similarly, in 2013, personal trainer Andrew Dixon highlighted the trick behind those gobsmackingly dramatic weight loss transformation photographs. He took a series of shots in the space of about an hour - tweaking his stance, posture and the image lighting - to reveal just how deceptive many of these drastic weight loss images actually can be.

It is easy to get caught up in the "perfection" that appears to exist in everyone's life but your own.

And in October this year, we saw singer, actress and model Zendaya sharing before and after snaps of herself in criticism of a magazine that had drastically altered her appearance. "These are the things that make women self-conscious, that create unrealistic ideals of beauty that we have," she wrote.

Around the same time, award-winning actress Kate Winslet was signing a contractual agreement with L'Or'eal stipulating that her appearance was not to be edited in any of her upcoming Lanc^ome adverts.

While it may be no surprise that models, movie stars and musicians are using various apps and strategic edits to depict more bountiful butts and boobs, or that they are filtering their posts to make their lives appear ever so fabulous, it takes a great deal of bravery for someone, especially an 18-year-old, to challenge the system.

And so I take my hat off to O'Neill and the others who are actively trying to shine a light on the terribly unattainable status quo being perpetuated by so many of us on social media. Because it would seem we find ourselves in an awful self-perpetuating cycle - we aspire to unrealistic goals and digitally or physically alter our appearances to depict these skewed perceptions of perfection, which in turn, causes others to aspire to unrealistic goals.

How many viral rants will it take for us to realise what we are doing to our 12-year-old sons and daughters? And how can we work together to change all this?

* A former ITWeb journalist, Joanne Carew now resides in the Mother City, where she is admiring the mountain and completing her Masters studies at UCT.