She had to pose is what I'm getting from this. Granted, I'm not one of those people who thinks modelling is simple, but I'm not following what is severely dark about that.
If you read the captions you'll see a bit more. It's not about the posing, it's about the dieting and the fraying relationships with others.
Modeling has its own dark side but it's a job in which you work with co-workers. You're not getting your sister to take the shots. You're not disrupting family life in the same way. You also aren't actually graded on popularity and "likes" in the same way -- your job goes well or poorly and certainly since it's about appearance you get all the food disorders and etc, but there's still a level of remove. Someone else is taking the pictures and telling you what to wear and how to stand. The creative endeavor is not all on you. This girl, by contrast, was not just the person who posed but the one who set up the shots, had the sister take them, watched the "ratings," did the testing on what people liked, etc. On the one hand, that complete "creative control" is cool. On the other hand, she was very literally chasing the approval of others.
I think they probably skimmed right on over some of the really dark parts, like the restricted eating and insecurity that this sort of externalized approval processes would cause in most 15-year-olds. Some of us old people do weird s(tuff) when a high-school reunion is coming up, and we are supposed to be mature and grounded. Haha. But remember, that 15 is definitely an age where you have a somewhat more limited idea of the scope and shape of a good life.
Apparently it took over her life, became an obsession. Social media made it easy to collect acclaim and popularity on a massive scale. Massive compared to what physical, real life offered.
Modeling is not an obsession, it's a job. You do it when you're young, smoke a lot of cigarettes etc, and then you move on. It's like grad school but with even more skeezy old guys.
(Now, math modeling may become an obsession...)
edit: just to be clear, oldmanjay, I am not making any comments about old guys in general! some of my best friends are old guys!
Becoming a model is an obsession for some young women. For models, it's a gig job, and getting gigs is hard. Only the top 100 or so models worldwide make real money. If you're in LA, you probably know some actress/model/waitress types. I had a friend whose career peak, after years of work, was one McDonalds' commercial that got nationwide distribution.
Below the top tier, the work is not that great. There's trade show work as a booth babe. There's catalog modeling ("OK, the next one is the blue sweater, #6522, and hurry it up, we have 20 more to do before lunch").
Totally agreed. Hence the comparison with graduate school: you often have to work other jobs to support the effort, you've got a dream you'll make it big, you realize the toll it's taking on your life, and you probably stop doing it eventually. Even if you "make it," you're probably not a top model (a prof at Princeton) but instead a commercial model (prof at directional state U or small Midwestern religious school). Below the top tier, the work is not what you were sold on in grad school, but you do get to make money doing something you kind of or really like. (Please quit if you don't like it at all.)
Even American literature has way better job security and pension prospects than modeling, though.
Yeah it's similar to modeling, but social media completely changes the dynamics. Models usually work in controlled environments with professional photographers and have their pictures airbrushed to perfection. The final result is published in some magazine and any enquiries are handled by some middleman. As you can see there are many layers insulating a model from her fans. Social media completely tears that down and you get metrics like "likes" and you read comments from people from all over, and suddenly there's a pressure on you from all these people. They also don't really have the support network like other models or photographers or editors or managers. They're usually doing it all on their own on their phones with light editing to get that "natural" look. Lastly at her age she's a high-school senior, old, but hardly what I'd consider responsible enough to handle her personal life professionally, especially when her whole image was embedded in social media.
I recommend you check out this article about why the creator of Flappy Bird took his game down. [0] Some might say he was just doing game development too.
Her "coming out" is not applicable to my life (and presumably not yours) as I'm a very casual social-media user (also, I guess, an old man at 42), so at some level I can see how it seems trivial. And the clickbaity, overly dramatic headline here (reused from teen vogue... which I'm not familiar with but I'll guess is not heralded as a literary journal of merit) doesn't help sell the story too much.
But I know enough young people to realize that the social media "like"-fueled bubble she was apparently living in is not unique to her and is surprisingly pervasive/scary among a lot of people her age (even those who aren't "internet famous"). Given that, I totally respect her realizing how superficial it can all be, realizing how misleadingly disconnected from real-life it can be and stepping back and telling her story of what seems like a real social media obsession so that others might step back as well and rethink how they deal with social media.
Nobel prize worthy? No. Of course not. But brave within the context of her life. So kudos, Essena O'Neill, Australian girl I've never heard of but who may have a useful message for others.
Because the overwhelming narrative for attractive people on camera is "I woke up like this." Candid-looking pics like these lie brazenly about how much effort goes into making the perfect shot, and self-conscious kids burn themselves out trying to live up to a standard that is literally impossible in real life.
We're not talking high levels of reality-manipulation here, we're talking careful poses and taking lots of shots to pick out the best one.
The reason that most girls will never look that good in photos isn't because they don't take enough shots to get a good one, it's because they're not as good-looking as that girl is to start with.
She's trying to create a movement out of it: http://www.letsbegamechangers.com. I'm not sure how I feel about this, if it's sincere and genuine or just a marketing ploy. Hopefully the former.
It collapsed two countries and nearly got a third but ended with exchanging one dictator for another. How is Tunisia these days? The origin gets overlooked with the rest of the shit show going on.
The goodness or badness of the various revolutions going on is, at best, debatable. I suggest waiting 20 years to collect more data before attempting to debate it though.
That's fine and I agree to some extent. But you said 'nothing good for anyone.' Some organizations abusing social media doesn't nullify the good things that have happened because of it.
speaking of jobs, where does the product ultimately take the public? Not alive during the dev. of rockets, and space exploration, but everything since then seems to just be a circle jerk about the next uber-for-pulling-bugs-off-my-windshield.
This article strikes me as a person who begged for attention via social media changing their tactics and begging for attention by being anti-social media. That is to say, this strikes me as quite vapid.
This is a total ploy. There is a link to "cool products".
This is the ULTIMATE in viral marketing. By removing herself from Instagram, she has done a humble-brag to get attention. By highlighting the issues she has with her quite attractive photos, she actually gets more attention, and can become a thought-leader and thus product pusher for marketing firms.
The difference is that the marketing firms will now be new-age companies. From her info page [1]:
"I wish to create a platform that acts to spread new age messages of conscious living, addition to technology, minimise the celebrity culture, promote veganism, plant based nutrition, environmental awareness, social issues, gender equality, controversial art etc."
Look, I'm probably just cynical, but this seems to be a self-promotion vehicle by an attractive teenage girl.
I think perhaps the most relevant bit is that celebrity can feed a hunger you didn't know existed, and drive you off balance unexpectedly. She isn't the first, nor the last, young women to get sucked in. What is perhaps unique here is that she didn't have a sleezy promoter or other manipulative type who suckered her into the life, instead she did it to herself by putting herself out there on Instagram. All the angst and none of the side benefits of being this week's hot fashion model.
Some people are more attractive, cooler, more interesting, than others. It's not some evil plot by the corporations to make us feel bad about ourselves. These people are really out there. The left wing narrative that all bad things that happen to us stem from some structural power imbalance in our society, is blind to this fact of nature. So they need strange stories like this to explain away the apparent differences in how popular and cool people are.
Maybe some do, but there is a distinction between intentionally making people feel bad about themselves, and advertisements that simply holding up some look or personality as attractive/cool. Some people might interpret the latter as an attempt to make people feel bad about themselves, but I respectfully disagree.
When it comes to intentionally making people feel bad about themselves, I don't see much of this, since negative advertising is not very popular. Most advertising I see is motivational/aspirational, i.e. showing people an image that people believe they can attain.
