standard – Social Blog

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Do you also catch yourself mindlessly scrolling through Instagram whenever you have got some time to spare? Believe me, you are not alone. But have you ever wondered how all these images of other people’s bodies may affect how you view your own body? No matter whether these pictures are your friend’s holiday picture, influencers’ gym selfie, or a celebrity’s beach photoshoot. You may think by yourself: “I wish I looked like her”.

Nowadays, the usage of social media is gradually growing and has already infiltrated into our daily lives. Instagram creates the illusion of perfection which is perceived by many as the beauty standards. In contrary to these beauty standards, our normal non-perfect lives seem somehow abnormal. As a result, some people may resort to drastic measures, or even eating disorders as their dissatisfaction with their body grows to try to achieve these unattainable goals as “beauty standards” (Dakanalis et al. 2014).

As we are scrolling through Instagram or posting pictures of ourselves, negative thoughts about our own body may arise (Holland & Tiggermann, 2016). A harsh comment by someone may result in dissatisfaction with our own body as many of us tend to interpret our social standing through comments or social comparison (Toma et al. 2008). A nice example is a video I encountered a few years ago by Cassey Ho, a social media fitness entrepreneur. Please watch the video below.

This video reflected how the comments by others on social media may affect how we feel about our own body. It made me start wondering how much of what we see are real on Instagram. Nowadays, there are numerous apps for altering your face and body as well as beauty filters to cover your imperfections (Fallon, 2014). Many of the pictures we see online are altered to enhance their features before it goes online. Even if I do not want to admit it, I will often find myself comparing to these influencers as well. I believe many followers of these Insta-celebrities do as well and what these followers think, actually becomes the new beauty standard.

This is just how trends work; they are going in and out like a fast fashion. Back in the day, flat chest and slim waist were in and now curvy body, thick lips and big booty are in. What is next? What do you think about the current beauty standard that is defined by altered pictures as the result of the current technology? Are you able to catch up with the current trend or will you rather alter yourself just to fit in? Let me know in the comments below!

Sources:

Dakanalis, A., Clerici, M., Caslini, M., Favagrossa, L., Prunas, A., Volpato, C., & Zanetti, M. A. (2014). Internalization of sociocultural standards of beauty and disordered eating behaviours: the role of body surveillance, shame and social anxiety. Journal of Psychopathology, 20, 33-37.

Ho, C. (2015) The “Perfect” Body [Video File]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsL7W-GHhJA

Holland, G., & Tiggemann, M. (2016). A systematic review of the impact of the use of social networking sites on body image and disordered eating outcomes. Body image, 17, 100-110.

Fallon, K. (2014). Streams of the self: The Instagram feed as narrative autobiography. In Proceedings of the interactive narratives, new media & social engagement international conference (Vol. 101, pp. 54-60).

Toma, C. L., Hancock, J. T., & Ellison, N. B. (2008). Separating fact from fiction: An examination of deceptive self-presentation in online dating profiles. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34(8), 1023-1036.

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Introduction

Netherlands Standardization Institute (NEN) has been supporting the standardization process in the Netherlands for over 100 years. Standards are often voluntary agreements between market players that joined one of NEN’s 480 standardization committees. They are laid down in documents managed by a standards organization, such as NEN. Popular standards include ‘ISO 9000 – Quality management’ and ‘NEN 7512:2015 – Health informatics – Information security in healthcare – Requirements for trusted exchange of health information’.

NEN is currently managing over 33.000 standards, which are available on their online store or for sale at their office in Delft. As some of the standards are required to be used by Dutch law, part of these documents are made ‘open access’ to the general public. Because NEN is a non-profit business organization, the profit margin on the sale of these standards is minimal. Parties interested in the standardization procedure bear part of the costs of the standard development process. This income, together with the proceeds from the sale of standards and the transfer of knowledge in training programs, ensures that NEN can carry out all its duties.

Standard development process

The development of a standard usually takes a few years and is divided into several stages. The first stage in the development of a standard is understanding the market demand and create a new work item proposal (NWIP). When there is enough support, stakeholders will be approached in the preparation stage. When there are enough interested stakeholders, the committee stage will occur. A committee will be formed out of the stakeholder’s pool. This committee will discuss the content of the new standard in the enquiry stage. This will occur in around-the-table meetings. Standards will be saved in Microsoft Word documents. The documents will be saved in a database called the ISOlutions program and automatically shared with other committee members. After the committee discussed and confirmed the content of the standard, there will be a ballot in the approval stage. Whenever there isn’t a majority supporting the standard, the content will be reviewed in the enquiry stage. However, if there is a majority, the standard will be approved and published in the publication stage (ISO, 2016).

Current model

The current strategy of NEN to consult its customers is to reach out through press releases. In this way, certain parties know that NEN is about to undertake a new activity that they might find interesting to join or comment on. A press release is shared on NEN’s own website (www.nen.nl) and send to specific publishers of magazines in a field coherent with the activity to reach experts on that field. Additionally, these press releases are shared in one of NEN’s sixteen email newsletters. Another more recent method of reaching out to potential customers is to share these press releases on LinkedIn with the aim of reaching a different audience (i.e. the audience that does not visit NEN’s website or reads these magazines/newsletters). However, as LinkedIn is not convenient for this approach and limited in terms of reachability (i.e. articles are usually only shared within NEN’s existing network) this method is not as effective.

Disruptive model

Through a community all stakeholders can get involved in the process of drafting standards: a community will make it easier to get in contact with other stakeholders to interact with a centralized system. Additionally, questions can be asked and answered among other stakeholders who are in the same field and therefore have a lot of inside knowledge. Also, by being active in the community answering questions, these experts will be more visible for third parties bringing additional value. Also, NEN deals currently with 150 questions a day about the norms. This can decrease when stakeholders can ask the questions in the NEN community and therefore will save NEN a lot of time.

A prospective community can be combined with NENCrowd (NEN’s crowdfunding platform) to offer additional benefits to backers. In this way, price differentiation is realized and thus a larger potential customer base can be served. This also works vice versa: If NEN’s prospective community attracts a lot of users, more and more people are getting involved. This can cause an increase in financial contributors.

Thank you for reading! Team 76

References

ISO (2016). ‘Voting and membership in ISO’ retrieved 11 October 2016, from
http://www.iso.org/sites/ConsumersStandards/voting_iso.html

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