Digital Story Proposal: Body Image in the Media

It is no secret that the media puts an enormous amount of pressure on teenaged girls in society to fit a certain body type and image. The media paints a picture of a specific image that women all over the world see as "the ideal figure". It’s no surprise that many teens have unrealistic expectations about their physical appearance. Teenaged girls tend to be the most severely and commonly affected group in society from the media’s standard of beauty. For some, this focus on perfection may lead to extreme measures,such as eating disorders or drug use to lose weight and improve body image. Girls tend to feel a sense of failure for not living up to this image, instead of being proud of and loving who they are and the image they have. From an early age, they are exposed to the use of super thin cultural icons representing ‘feminine beauty'. Constantly being compared to computer-manipulated images of already thin and cosmetically ideal models, women of all ages, not just teens, develop and suffer from body dissatisfaction, depression, anorexia, bulimia, perfectionism, low self-esteem, and other psychological damages. The drive for thinness inherit to many women is a learned behavior that media sources, especially magazines, explain how to achieve. Women are expected to have certain body characteristics that just aren’t realistic: not everyone has large breasts, a small waist, and long legs. Girls also grow up believing that they should fit into some sort of category, not appreciating diversity and uniqueness that truly makes someone beautiful. Although at some point it becomes apparent that the majority of women do not fit into media’s definition of beautiful, psychological damages are already incurred and the time spent unhappy cannot be given back. For my digital story, I plan to create a video of pictures. These pictures will contain example images of the "ideal figure" that the media presents through television and advertisement. There will also be images of girls negatively effected by this media pressure. My video will also contain slides of facts and statistics about my this topic. It is possible that a clip of an interview will be included as well. Sources: Just Say Yes- Self Image Media Influences Google Image NEDA Feeding Hope

Permissions for SAP Project

For our SAP, we are using the PollEverywhere to create polls with questions about cyberbullying. We are going to post flyers around campus with the questions and the number students can text to give their answers. We learned we need permission to post flyers around the school and they needed to be approved so we went to Rodman Hall to see if they could help us. They told us that we would need to go to the student center. We walked to the atrium and then up the stairs and found a room over the university bookstore that was the office of student activities. There, we spoke with a woman named Janet Paradise. She told us that she was in fact in charge of approving flyers that go out on campus. We explained to her our project idea and how we want to execute it. She seemed to like the idea and explained that we should create an original copy of the flyer with the information we need and bring it back to the office. Then we would give her the flyer, and if approved, she would stamp it saying so. She would give us back the flyer and it is our responsibility to make about 65 more copies. We would bring the copies back to Janet and she would distribute them that day. We are going to create two sets of flyers. The first will have the questions we want to pose to the student body. The second set will be the results so everyone can see how the polls worked out.

Literature Review

Richard Donegan said, "Bullying has been engrained in American society since the country's founding. Bred from a capitalistic economy and competitive social hierarchy, bullying has remained a relevant issue through the years". Although bullying has always been apart of society, the issue expands with the pace of time and continues to be present in the daily lives of many. With the growing and expanding of technology, bullying has become easier to do. As technology has evolved over time, bullying has proliferated. Cyber bullying is a major issue in today's society, but it wasn't always. It did not become a major issue until the start of common social networking sites, such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter. Many studies on the issue have been done, and the majority of results show that people choose to cyber bully instead of having face to face conflict conversations, because it is faster and easier to fight. Also, the intensity level of the bullying is higher, because cyber bullies have the luxury of hiding behind the computer screen. They have more confidence to bully others and make derogatory remarks, because they do not have to face those they are victimizing in in person. Bullying is something that most people deal with at a young age, whether they go through a phase of being a bully or a phase of being a victim of a bully. The reason most people deal with this at a young age is because bullying is associated with immaturity. Surveys show that one of the main reasons cyber bullying is still such a huge issue is because children are afraid to stand up for others and shut down bullying.

Problem Statement (What Now? / Why Now?)

The goal of our social action project is to target the main reason behind cyber bullying. We want to find out what drives people to cyber bully others, approximately how many people on campus have been victims of cyber bullying or have cyber bullied others before, and the most common ways cyber bullying is used. Our plan is to create three polls, all in which will contain multiple choice questions about cyber bullying. These questions will ask things such as "Have you ever been cyber bullied?", "Has anyone ever cyber bullied you?", "What drove you to cyber bully another person?", "In what way did you cyber bully that person", "How has someone else cyber bullied you?". Students on campus will know about these polls through an email that we will send out and flyers we will post in various locations around the campus. After we collect all the data from the polls, we will create a huge poster board of the data and display it somewhere on campus. Although we know that not every student at John Carroll University will participate in this survey, we hope that we will collect a lot of good and telling information from those that do. Cyber bullying is a serious issue and students need to be aware of just how serious it is and how relevant it is in the social world. Our goal is that once students see how many people are effected by this issue and victims realize they are not alone in the matter, then students will ban together to put an end to it.