TRANSCRIPT OF THE SPEECH WHY SOCIAL MEDIA IS RIUNING YOUR LIFE

By: Katherine Ormerod

Hi everybody and welcome! My name is Katherine Ormerod and I'm a journalist and

author and a social-media influencer. Now if you had told me that of the many things that make

up my CV, it would be posting pictures of myself online that really pays my bills? When I left

University, I would have probably laughed in your face, because let's be honest is quite

ridiculous. “How did I get here?” here's a question I asked myself quiet, quite often to be honest,

but really, I think if we wind back and look at where the beginning of my career started. It was

kind of a different planet on the side of my university career I was also working in fashion retail,

like a lot of other students. I fully fell in love with the fashion industry itself and thought when I

graduated that I might like to become a fashion Jet's. So, I enrolled on master’s program at the

London College of Fashion up sticks to the capital and started interning on a range of

publications including Sunday Times Style, Mary Claire, install magazine and at the

independent newspaper. Back then, office culture was quite different. When our editors wanted

us to request a fashion week ticket for them, we had to use this thing called a fax machine. We

were on our phones all day, but our mouth was at the receiver and those phones were attached

to the desk. There was no Pinterest, there was no Instagram, there wasn't even Twitter.

However, still quite a lot of money left in magazine publishing which meant I had some insane

experiences. Like the time I sailed across the Cote d'Azur on the back of a yacht, just to get a

single picture. Or another instance, when a brand flew me business class halfway across the

globe, just to spend seven minutes and I timed her with, with a designer. It was mad and

bonkers and it was a real ride, but it wasn't all glamour. The Devil Wears Prada is actually not a

work of fiction at all, it's a pretty accurate representation of what work culture was like on

magazines in the noughties. Some of my editors were comically demanding. Once, one of them

came over to my desk and unrolled the pair of socks that she was wearing, handed them to me
and asked me to hand wash them her in the Kalu's, and then use a hairdryer to dry them, I will

never know why. It was also pretty poorly paid and when I say pretty, I mean extremely. I

worked as a fashion intern for fifty pounds of weak expenses for two years, and that was nine to

nine Monday to Friday for under 3k a year. It was a really tough kick when you came from a

normal person background. Both my parents grew up in council houses, and I'm the first person

in my family to get a level was let alone go to university. So, there wasn't exactly a trust fund

waiting in the wings to tide me through. When I started my first proper job as in, I was on staff

my first salary was fourteen and a half thousand pounds living in central London and working

there too. By the time I was in my mid-30s as a senior editor on a national magazine, I was still

earning well below the London Bridge. Now look don't get me wrong, there are plenty of poorly

paid jobs out there and most of them let's be honest working the community slightly more

important of mine. But, it's pretty rare you would be paid so little to do a job which projects such

an image of glamour, that expects you to be dressed head-to-toe in designer clothes every day

with a perfect blow-dry. The disparity between the fantasy of what everyone thought my life was

and the reality of how I was actually living, in the end got too much for me. My crunch moment

came when I was 31, my husband had just left me and I was in terrible debt and I can

remember even though I was working 60-hour weeks, having to call my dad up to ask to borrow

some money to get a tooth filling. I just felt like such a failure. And what made it all that much

worse, was that everyone I knew thought I was living this glamorous exciting job, you know and

that I was a success as a person. I decided to meet the break, I quit my job and embarked on a

quest to find a way to carry on working in an industry I loved, while being able to support myself.

Now in the midst of all this, the landscape had been changing dramatically. When I first started

my final job on magazines, my editor told me to bin my blackberry and set up an Instagram

account and pretty soon I'd attracted a few thousand followers who all got to see the fantasy

side of my life. They didn't get to see the divorce, or the debt and they definitely never saw my

bad hair days. I set up a small digital agency to help brands create content for their social
channels, and their online channels, and started to really invest time in grouping my own

Instagram profile. Soon, I became a small player in the social media economy. Now, apologies if

you all know this, but for those of you who aren't big users of social media this is how it works.

Back in the day, a brand would have heard a certain amount of advertising and marketing

budget, which would have been divvied up across traditional channels of advertising like

billboards, and television, and magazines, things that we all kind of understood. These days, a

good percentage of that budget goes to people like me. And the reason is, that as we built our

platforms, we have gained the trust of our followers. And that trust, translated into influencing

their purchasing decisions. It is pretty effective, in fact what social media has done is

turbocharged the power of word-of-mouth recommendation. Now don't get me wrong, you can

lose the trust of those followers pretty quickly. If tomorrow you log on to my Instagram account,

and I am suddenly advertising teeth whitening strips, I accept that maybe you'll be leaving than

an aorta. But, at the beginning what brands really wanted to do, was to get to work with these

influencers who had the highest proportion of followers, it was all about huge audiences and a

total numbers game. The thing is those accounts the ones that got the most followers were

generally all pretty much the same. And they projected the same lifestyle, a wealthy, glamorous

world in which nothing had ever gone wrong. It was a world that I was very very okay with, let's

just say coming from fashion magazines. My account followed that pattern, that kind of template

to a tee. But after about a year of making my money that way, I don't know what it was, but I

started to feel a deep sense of unease, I couldn't put my finger on it. My Damascene moment

happened. Ironically, in Tulum Mexico potentially the most Instagram about destination in the

entire world. I was sitting on my Sun Lounger, trying to deal with a really tricky email from let's

call it a challenging client. In the background, I could hear one of my girlfriends on the end of the

phone to her factory dealing with a significant production issue. To my left, was yet another

mate who was going through the most brutal breakup. To my right, another friend who was

dealing with some pretty serious family trauma. All of us, were dealing with something either on
a professional or personal level. And then I looked at the pictures we were all posting. I bet you

can imagine what they look like. Sunsets, cocktails, pictures of us all together living our best life

in designer bikinis, and something inside me just burst. I felt, like I wanted to scream, “this is not

real life none of these girls are this goddamn happy the entire time”. On that trip, I decided. But

if I was going to carry on making my money this way, I was also going to have to start talking

about the other side of my life too. I was going to write about my divorce, I was going to write

about my debt, and my eating issues and my fertility issues; and I was going to ask every

woman that I knew in both magazine and social media worlds to do the same too. On the day,

that I set up work talk, oh I received about 50 emails. The next day, there was another 50 in my

inbox and it continued for weeks. And broadly, all of the messages said exactly the same thing.

And that was, thank God someone said something. The relief was palpable and don't get me

wrong it wasn't easy. You know, telling everybody that you're like quite poor, after you've been

creating this kind of image of glamorous Globetrotter for ten years. Let's be honest it's a bit

awkward, but it also felt so good to be honest. As I was doing the interviews for the website, one

theme kept cropping up time and time again and that was the psychological impact of viewing

so many images of perfection all day every day. And this was a universal situation, it didn't

matter where these people came from, it didn't matter how much they had. Over my time on

social media, it's made me feel many things: unattractive, overweight, stupid, and seriously

devoid of a sense of humor. This made me feel lonely, it made me feel really unpopular, it's

made me feel poor but also that I should be spending money that I actually didn't have.

Ultimately, it's fueled my insecurities. But this isn't an issue and the more and more I spoke with

other women, the more and more I understood that we all feel the same. And that's why I

decided; it was really time to tackle this problem head-on. Four months ago, I released my book

why social medias ruining your life, and you may say biting the hand that feeds I've heard it. But

equally, I managed to interview international influencers with a following of over 10 million

academics researchers, psychoanalyst, therapists, Plastic Surgeons. And all the evidence in a
highly abbreviated nutshell, pointed into the same direction. If we continue to use social media

the way we have been, we will seriously jeopardize our future health and happiness. Now, don't

get me wrong there were some fantastic stories about social media as well. You know, and as

humans, is the way we use technology rather than technology being necessarily in a farrier. For

myself social media has enabled me to continue working, while looking after my little boy. It's

meant, that I have found this holy grail of working and fashion while being able to support

myself. Importantly, it's meant that I will never wash another women's pair of socks. But, if we

do not change both our mindset and our behavior this obsessive comparison, soul-destroying

MV, passive social media use, you'll recognize it the stalking the creeping, the lurking. We, and

generations following us, will continue to be feeling these feelings of deep insecurity. To

underline the point, I went back through my social media feed and started reposting pictures

where I'd looked happy as Larry. But actually, my world has been falling apart behind the scene.

I posted pictures of myself, where I'd been in beautiful hotel rooms. But actually, I'd just been

dumped in that hotel room. I posted pictures of myself, where I was on these dreamy holidays

that look so fantastic, but I'd actually spent the whole time in a pit of despair thinking about the

state of my thighs. I posted pictures where I just had morning sickness off camera. I posted

pictures work just had a roll with my boyfriend, and I told those true stories. And beside each

picture, I used the hashtag: “why social media is ruining your life”. Soon, other women start to

posting similar images in solidarity. A few days later, Sky News got in touch and then the

newspapers and magazines followed and it went wild. This time when my inbox was inundated,

it was a lot of parents, saying that they'd used the campaign to show their kids the difference

between the lived life and the online life. But there were also lots of messages from people that I

knew who said, that they've had literally no idea what I was going through. And that I'd really

made them look at social media in a different light. Now today, social media still pays my

mortgage, but I now understand that I have the power to effect change and not just simply put

their next pair of shoes. Now don't can be wrong there's absolutely nothing wrong with that
fantasy. You know, magazines they changed the entire trajectory of my future, as a teenager

looking at them, they were everything. But we need to ground our expectation of reality, of what

real life will be like in the nitty-gritty, of what real life is actually like. Otherwise, the Monday

morning commute, the inevitable breakups, the awful financial struggles that we all go through.

The emotional challenges which let's be honest, are just part and parcel of a life they start to

feel unbearable. We start to believe that we are the only ones who suffer, while the rest of the

world swing, they're Gucci handbag nonchalantly buy as they go by on their busy perfect lives.

Everyone has demons no matter how many followers, no matter how much money you have.

And whether you communicate that online or not, they're still there. So, you can't use social

media to judge how anyone's getting through anything. Let me give a final example, every time I

post a picture of myself online, I'll probably have taken a hundred images. I choose one picture

to put up normally the most flattering and you get to see a 1% glimpse of one moment of my

day. You have no idea what's going on in my head or my heart, I could have just been sick, I

could have just been dumped, I could have just lost my job. So, don't let those 1% images affect

the way you feel about your real life. The one that you're living beyond the squares and

screams. Thank you so much!