Change of direction

Whilst researxhing into zines and zine culture, I started to drift mroe and more towards feminist zines and the content that they include. This in turn got me thinking about the work that I did for COP in first year and I decided I wanted to extend that specific part of my knowledge. I was also becoming increasingly bored of m proposed research question and feel that this is because I was just using COP as an excuse to make some more zines. Due to the visual journal element, this isn't something I can follow through on and I would rather investigate this area of practice in my own time or throughout other modules.

To develop a new theme/question, I started to look at some starting points from last year:

Feminism
Femzines
Gender
Femininity
Gender Stereotypes
Body Image
Sexualisation
Objectiication
Narccissism
Objectivity

After highlighting some key themes and ideas, I started thinking about gender and how media/image starts to construct our idea of gender, what gender already means to us, and how this can contribute to everyday sexism/discrimination. Media is something that we incorporate into our everyday lives on a huge scale. It influences almost every aspect of our lives wether we are conscious of it or not.
This led on to me starting to think about gender and identity, and how the media influences our personal construction of identity. I started to come up with a few questions that could be the starting point for my essay:

"How does the media impact the way in which women view themselves?"
"How does the media impact our views of gender?"
"How do role models in western media influence the construction of identity?"
"How does media influence womens construction of identity?"

When I started to think about media and it's influence on women and identity, I started to think about how social media can influence our personal choices and how we view ourselves. I read an article somewhere online about how social media was linked to the downfall of young girls health and education as the were prioritisng their online image over anything else. Social media is shown to have links with depression in young girls, which in turn is linked with higher obesity rates in young girls. These heightened rates of depression and obesity are having a knock on effect on how young girls view themselves and how they perform in school. I found this really interesting and feel that it is something that I would want to explore and examine further.
Possible question:
How does media impact the physical and mental health of young girls?