How the "Selfie Phenomenon" is Re-Defining Beauty

This article was originally published on my blog. For more of my work, please visit randeastwood.com. Thank you.

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I really liked this video (below), and it makes a very salient point toward the end: that social media (Internet/digital technology) is widening the definition of beauty, and putting the reigns back into the hands of individuals to define this for themselves.

This, obviously, is a good thing, as the mainstream media and its corporate sponsors have been defining beauty for us—in order to sell their products—for decades now, and this has come at the expense of our own self-esteem and self-worth.I recently read the book Ugly as Sin: The Truth About How We Look and Finding Freedom From Self-Hatred by Toni Raiten-D'Antonio in which, among a host of other brilliant insights, the author points out how the media and its corporate sponsors are inundating us with unrealistic (and photoshopped) ideals of beauty, and bombarding us with the message that in order to be accepted, to be loved, to be happy, to be successful—at anything—we must be beautiful, and this is what beautiful is, so buy our products so you can be beautiful too.

This is a multi-billion dollar industry, and their relentless marketing campaigns are destroying the self-image, self-esteem, self-confidence, and self-worth of people around the world.

I was aghast upon recognizing my own gullibility—being as highly attuned as I am to state propaganda and false and/or manipulative messages from the mainstream media—for I, too, had fallen victim to the charade that beauty = acceptance, love, happiness, and success, while ugly = cast out, shunned, lonely, failure; and believe me, this false message hit me particularly hard, because, as I often say: I have a face for radio, and a voice for print...

But the truth is that—just as we are all geniuses in our own way—we are also all beautiful in our own way.

Look around—we are all pretty much in the same boat as far as looks go; we typically don't see those perfect people (with teams of makeup artists and stage lighting and photoshopped photos) in our daily walk of life, out in the real world where we must all attempt to survive and hope to thrive; no, for the most part, we only see them on the digitized screen—and then it's usually just to provoke us to buy something.

Now, our "selfies" are flooding into the world, for all to see—and real, true beauty is making a comeback—and it's a beautiful thing!