How is it that something girls love so much can also create so much anxiety, paranoia and aggression? I'm talking, of course, about social media. This week, as I continue my tour of BFF 2.0 -- girls' social world online -- I'm talking about the paradox of social media.
On the one hand, social media can ease many of the insecurities girls feel about their identity and relationships. If real life has dealt you a hand you mostly cannot change, a few clicks help a girl control her online appearance. Worried about weight gain or acne? Post a flattering photo as your profile picture on Facebook. Want people to know you listen to cool music? List hip indie music festival pages under your favorite interests. Wish your peers saw you as "different in a cool way?" Upload an artsy still life photo you took. Don't have a boyfriend, but want to show everyone that guys still like you? Change your profile photo to one of you and your best guy friend from camp.
A girl's social networking profile is a persona she constructs, a photoshopped billboard on the information superhighway. It also offers a salve for the anxiety so many girls feel about relationships, providing the answers to burning social questions like, What do other people think of me? Do people like me? Am I normal? Am I popular? Am I cool?
A constant drumbeat of texts, especially from (and in front of) the "right" sort of senders, makes it clear that you are wanted, needed and liked. Photos of you and your friends laughing, posing and partying are a kind of social press conference, an announcement that these are my friends, this is my tribe, I am part of something important.
All this, however, at a cost. Here's where the paradox comes in.
The same tools girls use to alleviate insecurity are just as likely to inflame it. As relationship becomes more public and visible online, we learn things we would rather not know. Meghan, 17, called a friend to go to a movie. The friend said she didn't feel like it; later, Meghan read online that she had gone with someone else.
Social media forces girls to bear witness to painful realities of relationship that were previously hidden from view. It is a new kind of TMI, or "too much information:" publicly posted photographs of an outing or party you did not attend, or a personal web page like Formspring, can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief.
Where information is power, there can be no filter. Girls click to consume even the most painful social news, because it is just a click away, and because they can. As a result, girls learn to comb the electronic terrain both to connect and protect their social status. Thirteen year old Jessica described her phone as a periscope that offered her intelligence on a conflict she was having with a friend:
"If I didn't have a phone, I would have probably been more scared to go into school, like, that Monday because I wouldn't know what was going on. I wouldn't know who was mad at me and who wasn't, because I wouldn't have been able to talk and ask people. Like, I wouldn't have known if Maureen was on my side, if she was forgiving Jill again. I would know nothing. I would just know that Jill...was going to be so mean to me when I got back on Monday."
This world is not so very different from the video games many boys play. These games recreate dark, unpredictable worlds that reveal lurking enemies and rewards. So does social media. For the self-conscious or insecure girl, technology can become a crippling addiction, an insatiable hunger not just for connection but the elusive promise of being liked by everyone.
In a recent survey, Secret's Mean Stinks found that 87% of girls surveyed agreed that social media sites have the power to be used positively in the fight against bullying. That's why I'm partnering with Mean Stinks on Facebook to create an empowering online platform where girls can find the tools to end the mean streak and start a movement of nice. Next week, I'll be back with more excerpts from the new Odd Girl Out!
This post is excerpted from the newly revised and updated Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls. The new OGO includes two new chapters on girls, social media and parenting in a digital age. Order it now!
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sends them into anxiety attack? So drama-oriented that not knowing if S. is on their side or if G. is still angry at them would scare them away from school on mondays? So desperate from attention that they would invented themselves a fake boy-friend or false artistic tastes?
As a young woman who was still in high school a few years ago, I found this article almost offending. If girls really think and act this way, there is really some wrong.
So the author believes that this is new behavior?
Back in high school, there was plenty of gossip, and "mean girl" behavior.,,but it was "in the closet". You never knew half the stuff that was said about you, which may have been a good thing in some ways...but not always. I found out 15 years after high school that I was considered "gay". (Nothing wrong with it...just not factual.) Women I had gone to school with were shocked when I married, and had a child. The "teen council: sits in judgement on all...social networking just makes it more evident.
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Yes, except... these games are fake, generally fun, and you can turn them off anytime you feel like it. Very rarely does anyone get upset, offended, or hurt while playing them... because nothing in the real world is at stake. I'm not saying video games are all positive... I'm saying the analogy is flawed.
I thought the idea of social networking was to connect with others, rather than to create an artificial persona. Women spend enough time concerned about how they appear and how others perceive them. I am afraid that social networking encourages both genders to try to appear different than they are in order to be more popular. I certainly felt the urge to do so when I was on facebook. I think social networking makes PEOPLE nervous. If you compare yourself to someone who APPEARS on these sites to be incredibly social and popular and attractive (and we all do), you are bound to feel worse by comparison. Add to that the intrigues and daily rejections of typical teen life, multiplied and amplified through social networking, and the true benefit to teens of both genders is hard to fathom.
There are already young people measuring their self-worth on the basis of the number of "friends" they have and on how many posted a birthday comment on their wall. WTF?
you may also be confusing social media with the essence of "satisfaction" in a consumer capitalist society. your products are supposed to "complete" you the way religious faith or a romantic relationship used to.
anyone caught up in this manipulation and delusion is in for some psycho-emotional trouble once the spell is broken.