Wedad Mourtada, Reading Responses 11/15 – ENG 2100: Writing 1 with Jay Thompson

One way I practice crap detection is when people say random things about religion. For example, a few months ago, one of my friends told me something about Islam that was a little hard to believe. He’s not that religious, and he once said that he just says things that make sense to him. I can’t listen to anything anyone says about my religion because it means a lot to me. I decided to watch youtube videos of a few Muslim scholars explaining the topic that I was confused about. I also asked my mother because I think she knows a lot about Islam, and I spent a few days researching that topic on google and reading about other people’s experiences. I found my answer through one of the videos I watched because they matched all the other sources.
One thing that I learned from Lunsford and Ruskiewicz is that “recent sources are often more useful than older ones.” I didn’t think this mattered. As I was finding sources, I realized all the sources were pretty new. However, I didn’t know it made a difference. In some fields, older ones are better, but that doesn’t apply to my research question because I’m talking about social media and mental health, so I’ll stick to finding recent sources.
One thing I learned in the past is never to relate the writing to my own experiences. That’s why I struggled to connect my analysis project to my own experiences, and I’m already thinking of ways to do it with this project. However, now I know that it’s actually better to connect it to my own experiences.
Instagram models are not responsible for other people’s insecurities. As young adults, we all can choose how we want to spend our free time. We could scroll on Instagram models’ Instagram pages for hours, or we could decide to do something that makes us happy. The majority of teenagers are aware of photoshop and how realistic it could look, yet still choose to compare themselves to people who use it. The Instagram models that use photoshop are just as insecure as everyone else is. Most of them don’t even have a safe place to talk about body image issues because they profit from photoshopping their pictures. People don’t realize that and blame those models for their insecurities. Many people claim that they shouldn’t photoshop their pictures because they set unrealistic beauty standards for young girls. However, young girls shouldn’t even have social media. People should learn to stay away from things that bother them instead of actively finding ways to hurt their feelings.

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