By Alana Roche’ |Staff Writer|
Social media makes you famous in this day and age and social media users have become our celebrities.
However, this could be either good or bad.
Social media sites like Instagram, Twitter, and Vine have become much more than a place for people to share with friends. People can gain thousands of followers and potentially become famous.
‘Instafamous’ is defined as “a person who’s famous on the popular app Instagram because they have thousands of followers. Person is usually a pretty girl who posts a thousand pictures of her face or whatever food she’s eating,” according to Urban Dictionary.
India Love Westbrooks has received public attention for her physical beauty on Instagram, gaining 1.2 million followers, as well as celebrity status fame.
Westbrooks has her own reality television show called “The Westbrooks,” featuring her and her family on the BET network.
Although the show premiered on Oct. 5, viewers can see Westbrooks’ sisters, often challenging her for attempting to seem better than everyone, by calling her conceited because of her fame.
I think Instafamous celebs can sometimes allow their new fame to get to them, and potentially become vain because of the attention they receive from their pictures
Since there are numerous ways to communicate through social media, one may fully interact with their favorite celebrities.
According to yourbusiness.com, Ad Age reported that studies show some companies increase sales by 20 percent once they use a celebrity to endorse their product.
Essena O’Neill quickly gained 750,000 followers on Instagram by being a blogger and model who used sites like Tumblr to gain recognition.
“That’s when I had maybe 150k followers, with half a million followers, I know of many online brands (with big budgets) that pay up to $2,000 per post,” O’Neill told Complex Magazine.
Since then, O’Neill quit use of her social media pages to show her followers that what they see is fake.
She even edited her Instagram picture captions, stating on one of them, “NOT REAL LIFE – took over 100 in similar poses trying to make my stomach look good. Would have hardly eaten that day.”
I believe when people see O’Neill’s Instagram page, it seems like she lives a perfect life with a perfect body, which can potentially cause girls and young women to feel insecure. I think this can be a negative impact of social media fame.
O’Neill has started a website to influence positive change by allowing people to see what was truly motivating the content posted on her social media.
The Kardashian clan’s youngest member, Kylie Jenner, just turned 18 and already has 40.7 million followers on Instagram.
Jenner even created a world-wide trending sensation known as the “Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge” that encouraged people to make their lips plump like Jenner’s in extremely dangerous ways.
“Not only can significant pain, swelling, and bruising result from these suction techniques, but there is potential risk for scarring and permanent disfigurement with repeated attempts,” said board certified dermatological surgeon Dr. Dendy Engelman to Seventeen magazine.
This shows how social media can affect the public.
There are other social media fame stories like “Big Nik” who became famous from his funny videos on Vine.
He and his family just got a web reality series called “The Keswanis: A Most Modern Family” on people.com.
Nik told people.com, “The thing with sudden fame is that people get overwhelmed by it. A lot of people develop really big egos. So I’m just there to make sure no one’s ego gets inflated.”
I really like Nik’s attitude about his fame because it shows that social media fame can have a positive influence on a person and not make them stuck up because of it.
Although social media fame can result in either negatives or positives, there is a new type of celebrity emerging because of it.
Ultimately, I believe social media fame to be positive because new technological services have allowed people to become notable on their own by word of mouth.
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