The Pride of Digital Media
Digital media platforms in today’s world act as a common basis ground for everyone. Digital media can be broadly defined as a communication format wherein individuals set up profiles, generate content, and/or interact and maintain connections with other users via online platforms or other digital mediums. Participants may use digital media to interact with people they already know, and as a means to meet new people. It is also used as a mechanism to consume media content and engage in a range of other activities that vary based on the specific site. Prevalent examples of digital or social media sites include Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube.
We live in the 21st century where people are not afraid to express their feelings, love, or emotions towards each other. They are not scared to explore themselves to identify who they are as a human and how different they are from each other. One such topic is the ‘sexuality’ of a person, which forms the basic building block of any relationship. There was a time when people were afraid to speak about such topics in the open let alone be identified as one. As time passed the conservative thoughts of the society were demolished and a new thought arose from the rubble. Every year in June, people all over the world celebrate ‘Pride Month’ to show their support for the LGBTQ+ community.
You must be wondering if these two topics, ‘Digital media’ and ‘Pride Month’ are being considered in the same piece of writing when they hold nothing in common.
You are right in thinking so. While the dichotomy between the two is pretty huge within itself, they sometimes complement each other in making the world a better place. For people who are wanting to discover and understand their sexuality better, social media is also one of the places where one can find resources with access to the internet. There are several verified profiles on different social media apps, which are working only to provide relevant information and to burst the myths of the society on different sexualities that are considered taboo. Since the popularity of social media platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and Tik Tok has grown immensely in the last few years, the number of people who identify as LGBTQ+ community has risen exponentially.
Multiple factors can affect an individual’s well-being and mental health. Some of these can be positive, but most of the time the negative factors cause a higher impact on the individual. It demonstrated that external factors such as schools and religious institutions can affect their identity accepting process. Words, actions, and people can bring down the self-esteem of the community and it is important to analyze how they are perceived on social media. For LGBTQ+ youth, online community engagement generally (not entirely, as there are cases of cyberbullying as well) enhances well-being.
HOW DOES SOCIAL MEDIA ACT AS A FREE SPACE FOR LGBTQ+ COMMUNITY?
1. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, and other sexual and/or gender minority (LGBTQ+) youth identify significant benefits from engagement with social media, as well as other Internet-enabled technologies. While research comparing their use to their non-LGBTQ+ peers is limited, research has suggested LGBTQ youth may spend significantly more time online suggesting that social media serves as informal learning environments for LGBTQ+ youth during their identity developmental processes. (It might vary from individual to individual since there are different ways that a person can opt to get in the same learning environment.)
2. As LGBTQ+ identities remain highly stigmatized, social media sites provide youth with critical opportunities to explore, label, and practice disclosing their emerging LGBTQ+ identities; control and rehearse their social interactions; as well as access identity-specific resources.
3. Even engaging more passively with social media (such as watching LGBTQ+ YouTube content) enables individuals to learn about identity-specific issues and be inspired in their coming out process, increasing identity confidence.
4. Social media facilitates identity construction and communication by allowing LGBTQ+ youth to curate their online presence in a context characterized by relative safety (i.e., users can block or accept whomever they choose) and control over anonymity (i.e., users can choose how much [if any] of their life is made public)
5. The comparative anonymity available online facilitates opportunities for youth to develop and explore their identities in ways not feasible in offline communities.
6. Anonymous social media activities ensure that participants’ emerging LGBTQ+ identities are protected from premature disclosure and from socially significant individuals (e.g., friends, family) who may not be accepting. (Although ‘anonymity’ over social media can also cause harm to a particular group of people by cyber bullying and many other ways. For this part of the article we will be looking at the positive aspect at first.)
7. Participation in online communities may allow LGBTQ+ youth to access role models who share their experiences, as well as seek emotional and social support.
As individuals become more comfortable with their identity, they may engage in sharing LGBTQ+ content and participate in educating and supporting other LGBTQ+ people within their online networks. The research found that youth were able to use social media as a bridge to access resources within their offline communities while minimizing potential risks, making local LGBTQ+ populations more visible to young people. The Internet is perceived by LGBTQ+ youth as an efficient way to address gaps in identity-specific information as well as an effective means of learning about offline services and events.
Apart from this, it also enables heterosexual individuals to bridge the gap that has been created between the two sexualities by society. It enables them to show their full support to the LGBTQ+ community.
It has been demonstrated that the LGBTQ+ community has faced rejection and bullying, not necessarily from strangers but also from their same family and friends. This problem is encountered in both the online and offline worlds, but it is important to analyze the online world; the freedom of speech on social media can affect the community with deceptive comments made by users. The discussion focused on two cases that reported victims of bullying, demonstrating that the bullying encountered on social media can lead to depression and suicidal thoughts.
Social media have become a crucial battleground for sexual politics; they need to be taken seriously as spaces that produce values and norms about sexuality, deciding what kind of sexualities are supported, repressed, or disciplined. The more aware you become of the subconscious heteronormative (denoting or relating to a world view that promotes heterosexuality as a normal sexual orientation), patriarchal, ruling of society, the more apparent it becomes how scary and restrictive heteronormalisation in our lives is. Until men wearing skirts around town becomes as common as women in today’s Western culture wearing trousers, it appears society is still quite far away from changing this for good.
-Akanksha Singh & Rijul Arora
