A girl holds up a smartphone, her face contorted to express an exaggerated version of the emotion she’s actually feeling, until the camera catches her at just the right angle, under just the right lighting. At this instant in time, she snaps a photo to be posted on Instagram. A Twitter user carefully selects his words for a short and pithy tweet, meant to convey his intelligence and expertise. A Facebook user, like an author, edits her Facebook “timeline”, by highlighting significant moments in her life, uploading photos, and writing statuses. In doing so, she underscores and quite often exaggerates her most desirable traits for a potentially global audience.

Thanks to technology and social media, people have the power to control and promote their image to a large audience. Social media outlets have elevated the importance of the individual among the masses and certainly this is progress since the time when kings and queens were the only distinguished individuals in society. Everyone with access to the web can achieve celebritude by developing a strong social media presence. However, is there a point when the empowerment and voice so many people have found through social media morphs into low self-esteem and excessive self-preoccupation? Active social media use may be contributing to a narcissistic culture in which individuals are trapped in an endless cycle of low self esteem and the desire for affirmation that follows.

Junior Kailey Wendlandt has an online presence greater than that of most people, making her a poignant example of the effects serious involvement in social media can have. Her YouTube channel is extremely popular with 7 million hits and counting. However, with Wendlandt’s YouTube fame has come the pressure to please a large audience and maintain a strong sense of self esteem under the public’s eye. “I used to have it where I would get a really nice comment on a video and I would feel amazing about myself. But then I would get one bad comment, and it would ruin my day,” Wendlandt said. “At this point, I really could care less about what people think,” she said. Pressure to please and be perceived positively is inherent to all social media outlets when used to their fullest capacities. One does not have to be a YouTube star to feel on display or, perhaps dependent upon the affirmation he or she receives online. As someones with a huge online following, Wendlandt’s experiences of being scrutinized by the media are simply an amplified version of common symptoms of social media use.

Social media does have the power to boost people’s self esteem by making it possible for anyone to receive attention for virtually anything; however, this shallow culture of individual celebritude which the media promotes may also be harming users in the process. “It’s constantly about you, you, you, you, you,” Wendlandt said when describing how social media has caused people to obsess over their own self images. Spending so much time thinking about and shaping one’s own identity online can not be healthy.

While Wendlandt loves her YouTube channel and feels it represents honests aspects of her character, she believes that people’s online activity is not a good representation of how they actually are in real life. “The internet’s a place where people are pretending to be something they’re not,” she said. There is probably some personal honesty in almost everybody’s online profile and contributions to social media; however the facility with which people can pose as someone they are not and gain attention for it has been taken advantage of.

The good news is, just as social media can be manipulated for dishonest or narcissistic ends, so can it be manipulated for positive, healthy ends like connecting with other human beings and getting ones voice out in public. The key is to form engaging, fulfilling and deep relationships or hobbies because sadly, the once empowering nature of the media has evolved. It may, in fact, be more empowering to take a step back from the media than to cope with it’s negative effects. What matters in the end is that people are thinking about and deciding for themselves how the media makes them feel. After all, according to Wendlandt, “the Internet must be what you make of it.”