- Vanessa Shepherd
- Sep 17, 2024
- 2 min read
Image: Vanessa Shepherd & @taisiya-kozorez
Ever scroll through Instagram and feel like you’ve stumbled into this alternate reality? Things aren’t as colourful and happy in the real world, hey? How has this affected you? I had my son in 2022, and the delusional of social media hit me with all its fallacies everywhere I looked.
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 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' I realized 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. 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.
