I remember the first time I saw my sister smile at her phone. The shape of her eyes had widened, eyebrows raised, and lips pulled gently into what resembled effortlessness and beauty — an attempt at expressing the new persona she had envisioned to publicize to the media.
She was seven when she downloaded Musical.ly and Snapchat, the trending apps for creative expression and self-publication. I was nine when I first saw her make that uncanny smile. Having only seen her authentic, eccentric and genuine smiles in front of me, I responded to this surface-level lip-sync video with one question: “Why are you smiling like that?”.
Get Mdawg’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Of course she was taken back by my question — she believed it aligned perfectly with what the media had presented to her. Teenage girls with perfect makeup, styled hair, and media-trained facial mannerisms had brought a new perspective to the both of us regarding the feminine image. More importantly, how to flawlessly show off these articulate aspects of beauty online for numerical validation. Nonetheless, I was still shocked to observe her to be so directly impacted by it in such little time, as I believed it had little to no impact on me.
She responded, “You know you do that in your videos too, right?”
I, too, was shocked at this — I had no idea I was doing anything than being myself. Nine-year-old me assumed this new, exciting and captivating method of self-expression would do little to change me and people alike(and if it did, it would push us to be more authentic and expressive of who we are, exempt from its influence), yet it hooked us and the change continued remarkably. We, as many others growing in our community alongside us, began to pick up language and stylistic ideas that we had not have come up with ourselves. Simply, our thoughts were rarely ours, and the demonstration of this idea became more and more frequent.
While this change was something that brought the two of us a lot of joy, it took us from our unmasked, true sense of self that we were vastly more in touch with before this exposure. I lost my sister’s real smile entirely after a few years. Watching school photos and posted selfies change, her face molded into a variety of new ones I’d never seen before. They brought to me a sense of unfamiliarity to the kid she was and the raw emotions she expressed without subconscious mental training. I understood that this was happening to me, too, yet I was unaware of the signs directly. This information scared me as I could recognize this distance to myself from yesterday, but I couldn’t decipher the changes themselves.
Change happens as we grow, yes, but consciousness of specific influences is hugely important to our personal growth. Social influences that mindlessly remove our drive to follow our true inclinations, interests, and joys as humans is deserving of worthwhile examination. We are capable of minimizing our interest in what the media has to offer, and doing so will provide benefits we couldn’t have anticipated — it could be incredibly rewarding.
