“Try to make a good impression when you first meet someone,” I was told repeatedly growing up. “Put your best foot forward, son.”
I still try to follow that good advice, whether it’s a face-to-face meeting, through something I write or even just a simple text message (with everything spelled out in good grammatical form!). But could it be that, amidst a culture that’s seemingly devoted to yanking formalities and simple civilities out of everything, we’re somehow building a world that’s crazily obsessed with how we present ourselves to others? And that such obsessions are tearing us all down?
This is from our Culture Clips this week:
While several studies have shown that Facebook can undermine people’s happiness because of the way it showcases other people’s idealized lives, some believe that Instagram—thanks to its almost exclusive focus on pictures—may be even more corrosive. “You spend so much time creating flattering, idealized images of yourself, sorting through hundreds of images for that one perfect picture, but you don’t necessarily grasp that everybody else is spending a lot of time doing the same thing,” says Cataline Toma, who works at the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And Hanna Krasnova, of Humboldt University in Berlin, adds, “You get more explicit and implicit cues of people being happy, rich and successful from a photo than from a status update. A photo can very powerfully provoke immediate social comparison, and that can trigger feelings of inferiority. You don’t envy a news story.”
I somehow don’t think that’s what my parents had in mind!
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