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"You know it well \u2014 the sinking feeling you experience when the photo you posted on Instagram receives less \"likes\" than you'd anticipated. Or your perfectly-worded tweet suffers a serious lack of \"faves.\" \nWith this feeling in mind, Samia Khan and Justin Gordon launched an effort to help you lower your \"instacurity,\" a term they've coined to describe an excessive concern with one's social media presence, influence and likeability. \nIn the tongue-in-cheek public service announcement above, a host of well-known Internet entertainers, including comedian KT Tatara and Awkward Black Girl creator Issa Rae, warn of the perils of becoming too invested in social media.\nSee also: Social Experiment Asks: What's the Last Photo on Your Phone?\nWhile the clip itself is a satire of classic PSAs \u2014 complete with Sarah McLachlan playing softly in the background \u2014 the idea behind the video is one its creators take seriously.\nThe inspiration behind \"instacurity\" came about when Khan and Gordon noticed their own obsessive tendencies related to their social media accounts. \nGordon told Mashable that Khan \"has been known to text people to approve her status updates before posting, spend literally 20 to 30 minutes picking a filter and still hasn't followed me back on Twitter because she doesn't want to ruin her 'ratio.'\" \nThese insecurities relating to social platforms sparked the duo's interest in learning more about a potentially growing problem. After researching the subject further, they decided to create a mock PSA to spread awareness about the negative impact of social media obsessiveness. Gordon told Mashable that though he and Khan take the problem seriously, they felt they'd be able to reach young people best through humor. \n\"It was a tough line to balance: we didn't want to simply make fun of this problem, yet comedy is a great mechanism for encouraging us to do some self-reflection,\" he said. \nSince releasing the PSA, Gordon and Khan have put out other parody videos relating to instacurity, including a social media version of Ariana Grande's \"The Way.\"\n\nGordon said that these videos represent the Instacurity team's attempt to reach out to Millennials that they feel are most severely effected. \n\"In other words, we are using a 'fight fire with fire' approach: Creating content that depicts various situations of 'instacurity' to help Millennials realize how much of an influence social media has on our daily lives,\" he said. \"One can throw Millennials tons of stats, studies and stories of Internet addiction, but I don't think we will truly internalize this problem until we observe such examples and begin to generate a real discussion.\"\nImage: YouTube, instacurity"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/09/26/social-media-insecurity/>