What’s priming? On wikipedia you will see “priming is a phenomenon

whereby exposure to one stimulus influences a response to a subsequent

stimulus, without conscious guidance or intention.” Studies have

shown that based on things we have read, watched, and heard we can

be primed to behave in certain manners. This made me wonder, Instagram,

one of the most popular social media with over 1 billion monthly

active users, what has it done to me? As a heavy instagram user, I spend

hours scrolling and investigating my personal digital footprint over the

past few days trying to figure it out. By scraping hundreds of fashion

advertisements and campaigns on my instagram, I then classified them

by the gender of models, also their skin colour. In the results, more

than 75% of the models are females, only 17% are males. And even

though there are multiple different skin colour models shown on my instagram,

the percentage of the dark skin models is obviously lower

than the others. Moreover, while scraping, I found out that most of the

fashion campaigns used white skin or dark skin models but asian

models. In contrast, most of the fashion advertisements for selling

products used mainly asian and white skin models instead of dark skin

models. Besides, none of the models are fat or curvy. All of them are tall

and skinny, even the digital human.

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Now I wonder if I am influenced by instagram that’s why I only tend to design women’s clothes. I wonder if I am idolizing the bony gaunt body type without awareness. Am I racist? Or is instagram making me racist?