through the looking glass
#mystory
Curated Realitea
Ever find yourself scrolling through Instagram and feeling like you've wandered into some alternate reality? Like, the vibes are way more polished and colorful than anything IRL. How does that even sit with you? For me, it hit hard after I had my son in 2022. Suddenly, social media wasn’t just this fun distraction—it was a full-blown parade of delusion
My wake-up call came six months after my son was born, when I enrolled in a Master of Digital and Social Media degree program. The first course I took and later retook (balancing a newborn and school is HARD) was “Digital Media in Everyday Lives.”
​
​After reading an intriguing chapter from Elana Levine’s “Cupcakes, Pinterest, and Ladyporn: Feminized Popular Culture in the Early Twenty-First Century,” called 'Pinning Happiness: Affect, Social Media, and the Work of Mothers' (Wilson & Yochim, 2017) I realised the work of mothers never stops, even online. In my reality, every woman looked like they were effortlessly rocking motherhood. The kids and the toys were always colour-coordinated, the pictures of snacks were straight out of a magazine, and don’t even get me started on the mom with a full face of makeup making homemade cheezits.. Where was the sleep deprivation?!
​
My reliance on social media as a first-time parent created my views on parenting and showed them back to me as a one-sided life of constant perfection. Prior to this, I never took the time to look at how social media was affecting me. Through my subsequent time in this program, and even in my spare time, I would learn more about how the curated realities of online individuals were shaping my own perceptions and ideals. The more time I spent researching this, I became even more aware of how this perception was built on algorithms …among other things like likes and influencer culture. I found it very interesting how social media was pushing content on me to entertain but also borderline controlling my behaviours and beliefs of what should happen in this new chapter of life.
​
​Curated Realitea is a name I chose to reach generations Y, Z, and Alpha; to get the word out to the internet’s largest “Curated” demographic. How our perceptions are being shaped daily by the tools of the web. The name blends “curated” to highlight how the internet tailors’ content specifically for us, and “realitea” to combine “reality”—the state of actual existence—with “tea,” a slang term for revealing information. In this blog, I will spill the tea on the impact of social media on our daily lives and provide insights to my fellow digital citizens to help navigate and alert them to the manipulations and biases of our digital reality.
What can
you do ?
Merchandise
Contine to educate yourself with these free web tools and feel good while your on the web
​
Stay safe - https://www.esafety.gov.au/
Hatespeech online - Counterhate.com
Check out our merchandise page and get real with Curated AF, my algrothim slays , touch grass, facts over bots, and my Feed Says I’m Winning shirts, pullover & mugs !
About Me
​I'm Vanessa, an Internet Obsessionist and Web Detective! Welcome to Curated Realitea, a blog where I spill the tea on the deceptive world of social media. I am a stay-at-home mom living abroad in Australia from the United States. From YouTube with my toddler, Pinterest hacks for my home, trading dms and memes with my friends and family abroad, to pursing my master's in digital and social media - on, you guessed it, the internet, every space of my life revolves around my connection to the world wide web. And on this blog I will I investigate the consequences of a life entirely online.
