So over the past few days, my Facebook news feed has been full of selfies of women. I started to think my friends and family have all become extremely vain overnight, but after reading the photo captions I then found that the photo’s were to raise cancer awareness.The campaign has been a craze in the social media world as women have been sharing photos of themselves without make-up, whilst using the hashtag #NoMakeUpSelfie.
The viral cancer awareness campaign then started to become a case of friends nominating their friends to ‘dare to bare’ which was the reason the campaign spread so fast.This then sprung to mind the ‘neck nominations’ faze, where people (primarily young males) would nominate each other to down their drinks, now in my eyes, this is 100% narcissistic and stupid. So whoever started the cancer awareness campaign should not have associated it with the neck nominations as this portrays the campaign as a bit of a joke.
I researched into it and realized the amount of money Cancer Researched had received through donations was remarkable. Girls started screen-shotting their donation confirmations to Cancer Research which proved that they weren’t just taking a narcissistic photo of themselves. And before I knew it, I jumped on the bandwagon after a few of my friends nominated me.
People would comment on girls photos saying ‘oh you look gorgeous’ and ‘you look stunning without makeup’. This then made me question, is this just an excuse for girls to take a selfie and get a huge confidence boost. Other people on my news feeds then began writing status’s such as ‘Why do we need to be aware of cancer, i’m pretty sure everybody knows what it is’. But in my opinion, not enough people know what it is, and that every donation does help. Yes, taking a selfie is pretty narcissistic but who cares if its helping a charity?
I think viral campaigns such as this are a fantastic opportunity to spread news fast and the results have shown that social networking websites are a perfect platform for this.
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My Polysemic World 