Odd Girl Out (18 page)

There is a reason why the middle-school years are the most notorious for bullying. Developmentally, girls (and boys) are moody and self-absorbed, emotionally explosive, easily embarrassed, concerned about status, and quickly swayed by the opinions of peers. They like to test the limits of authority. When this adolescent froth goes on-line, it's not pretty. As Lindsey says, "It was just like all my insecurities thrown onto a computer and thrown at people, and they didn't deserve that." A girl's developmental process is rarely considered in the face of a child's wish to "be like everyone else" who has a phone, a computer with access to Facebook, or an iPod Touch. In chapter ten, I advise parents about how to navigate this dilemma.

Teens, writes social media scholar danah boyd, not only use technology to bond, but also "to seek attention and generate drama," often to relieve insecurity about status and friendship. In this self-reinforcing cycle, technology makes you insecure, so you use technology to feel better, but often in the process generate more stress, which makes you more insecure. As if girls' lives weren't hard enough already...

Lindsey is now applying to college and was eager to tell me about one of the more creative questions on an application. "They asked me, 'If you could get rid of one invention in the world, what would it be?' My first instinct," she said, "was Facebook."

 

cyberdrama

In the beginning, technology was an adjunct to relationship. It helped girls connect, filling the gaps of contact that opened up between home and school. Today, technology is part of relationship itself. With gadgets more portable and accessible, the average person aged eight to eighteen spends nearly eight hours a day using an electronic device.
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Like Leah and Ellie, at the beginning of the chapter, girls move fluidly between virtual and spoken conversation.

Real life is frequently experienced as a new opportunity to post or share online. As one high-school student I interviewed told me, the phrase "take a picture of me" now simply means "put it on Facebook." A college sophomore said, "People go to parties in college with the intention of just having [Facebook] pictures for the night. If someone makes a joke at a party, a person will be like, oh my God, that's the perfect title for my album." In 2009 a girl told
Teen Vogue,
"You're not dating until you change your relationship status on Facebook." A year later, "FBO," or Facebook Official, became the new measure of dating legitimacy.

Stand on the edge of any playground and you will see a scene play out day after day: most boys play games, and most girls linger on the edges to talk. The same is true online: social media is
social,
and girls use technology to connect and share. Girls typically send and receive fifty more texts a day than boys. Girls aged fourteen to seventeen are the most active, churning through a hundred texts a day on average. Girls are more likely than boys to carry their phones on them at all times.
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It is often said that technology simply magnifies the feelings and dynamics that were there all along. So, too, with girls. In real time, a girl's status is defined by her relationships: who she sits next to, which parties she is invited to, who she counts as her "best friend." Today, a socially aspirational girl must be the architect of her reputation online, on a new, uncharted plane of connection and coolness. A typical middle-class American girl sits at her laptop, chatting as the phone by her side vibrates with new messages (often while she's doing her homework). This balancing act requires a new kind of social expertise. It takes time, and it takes access.

This is why girls claim they "don't exist" if they lack a Facebook account. This is why parents sleep with confiscated laptops under their pillows; they know their daughters will do anything to get them back. And this is why girls show levels of rage and anxiety hence unseen when they lose phone or online privileges. It is precisely the value that girls place on their access to technology that illuminates its position at the heart of girls' relationships. It also underscores the need for us to pay attention to the everyday transactions of girls online.

The biggest mistake we can make is to assume that a girl "gets" technology in a way that an adult does not. Looks are deceiving. The world of BFF 2.0 has presented girls with new, unwritten rules of digital friendship, and it has posed a fresh set of social challenges. What does a one-word text mean when someone usually types a lot? What if you and your friend are texting the same girl, but she replies to only your friend? Does she like you less? How should you handle it? Online social interactions generate situations that demand sophisticated skills. Without them, girls become vulnerable to online aggression and worse.

 

A girl's adolescence is rife with moments of insecurity about identity and relationships. Online, girls discover a trove of tools that appear to ease those anxieties. 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. 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 2010 study by the Girl Scouts found that girls downplayed their confidence, kindness, and talents online in favor of highlighting how fun, funny, and cool they were.
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The study suggested a girl's social media profile was a persona she constructed, a photoshopped billboard on the information superhighway. Unlike the messiness of real life, where you might come to school wearing the "wrong" outfit or say something awkward in class, a Facebook profile is a cool, controlled social avatar intended to stand in for
you.
Online spaces like Facebook and Tumblr are new social proving grounds for girls, rivaling the hallways where girls show off new clothes or friends. Unlike real life, the true self is more easily hidden online.

Lindsey explained how it works: "The statuses I put up, I want people to know I like those bands. I want people to know I think those bands are cool. You create your Facebook to make it seem how you want to come off as a person." She added, "People paint the picture of themselves on Facebook." This "painting" is more like an airbrushed version of yourself and your life.

Social media also offers a salve for the anxiety so many girls feel about relationship. It can provide the answers to burning social questions:
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.
Lindsey explained, "People take these pictures to show this is how I want you to perceive me. I go to these parties, I go to these events, you're not as cool." The constant ping of texts, chats, video conference calls, and new messages are quick surges of connection that emotionally nourish a girl throughout out the day.

All this, however, has its cost.

The same tools girls use to alleviate insecurity are just as likely to inflame it. As relationship becomes more public, we learn things we would rather not know. Meghan, seventeen, called a friend to go to a movie. The friend said she didn't feel like it; later, Meghan read on-line that she had gone with someone else. Banned from the mall by her parents, fifteen-year-old Judith was seething when she spotted identical AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) messages from two best friends out shopping. "I'd prefer not to see that they were together," she told me. "I'd rather hear it the next day. Because I'm at home and I'm not doing anything, but they're together having fun." 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 can send a girl into paroxysms of anxiety and grief. Reading a personal Web page (like Formspring, examined later in the chapter) with ruthless anonymous commenters is a masochistic but not-to-be-missed ritual. Where information is power, there can be no filter. Girls click to consume even the most searing 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 stand sentinel over their social security. 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 Saskia 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 re-create 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.

Away at college and separated from her best friend from high school, Samantha, nineteen, watched Susie drift away. Every day, Samantha logged on to Facebook in her cramped dorm room to track the growing closeness of Susie and a new girl.

"I remember the first time she changed the profile picture of me and her to the picture of them," Samantha says. "I see their statuses are about each other. There are videos. It just makes you feel like you're being replaced." Even when she needs a break from the drama, Facebook's live-feed format is relentless, telling all. "You don't even have to stalk," Samantha told me. "Facebook does the stalking for you."

Using social media like a seismograph to detect every up or down in a friendship, the smallest infractions are recorded and felt. Of course, girls are not only witness to their own exclusion or embarrassment. They react to it. Where there is more information, there is more opportunity for paranoia and conflict: drama rises from digital soil constantly fertilized and refreshed with new dirt.

Should Meghan say something to her deceitful friend? How can Judith handle her feelings of envy and anger? Does Samantha have the right to confront her best friend? Although these twenty-first-century episodes may be inspired by timeless emotions, most girls (and the adults who advise them) feel confused about how to respond.

In part, this is because social media has established new expectations and norms within friendship itself. Many girls now believe that, along with keeping secrets and providing support, being a good friend brings digital responsibilities. While some can be easily learned, others create confusion and unrest.

Consider birthdays. "You measure how much a person actually cares by which form of communication they use," Samantha told me. "Acquaintances will write on my [Facebook] wall. A friend will text me. A best friend will call." When Samantha's best friend texted her late in the day on her birthday, she was hurt. "It kind of makes you feel like an afterthought." With girls constantly connected, they may judge and dissect even the timing of a message.

On Facebook there is an unspoken expectation that if you write on someone's wall, giving them a social "boost" with your presence, they will return the favor. A girl may write on a cute boy's wall or "like" the senior girl's new profile photo, hoping to elicit a public reply for all to see. But the outcome will depend on your social status: The new measure of popularity is how much or how often you need to reply to these public notes. If you are flooded with online notes and posts, you need respond to only the "coolest" friends.

With much of relationship now taking place in the harried shorthand of texts, statuses, and chats, misinterpretation is constant. "You can't see the person, you can't read their body language or their facial expression," Erin, sixteen, explained. "Like, you don't know what their motives are. It could take someone fifteen minutes to reply to your message. You don't know if they're ignoring you, just not there, you don't know if they don't want to talk to you."

Erin described the discomfort of waiting to hear back from a laconic boy she was flirting with: "Why isn't he texting me back? Did I say something wrong? Did I insult him? Am I too sarcastic? Does he not like me? Why isn't he replying? What did I do wrong? Is he trying to make me feel this way for some reason, like for a chase or whatever?" It is exhausting just to listen to the heavy lifting Erin's mind endures for the privilege of online footsie. Real-time flirting can be equally rife with angst, of course, but technology infinitely multiplies the occasion for it.

What if a friend stops signing her texts "xoxo"? Does it mean she's angry? When it happened to Meghan, she grew anxious. "Once you start losing that at the end of conversations, you start wondering, is everything okay? Are we losing touch?" Meghan considered confronting her friend to ask if anything was wrong. Perhaps she was reading something into a minor alteration that had nothing to do with her. But maybe not. She wondered if she might be seen as needy, weak, or demanding. She was not entirely wrong to be worried: girl culture has yet to settle on an answer. There is no clear path. This particular brand of "girl problem"—a change in the tone of a text—is only a few years old.

So are the newly public platforms that allow girls to vent their feelings about problems with friends. Imagine logging on to Facebook or AIM and seeing this on the profile of someone you are feeling uneasy about: "some people really piss me off but i'd rather not be direct about it." This post, from a high-school girl, was instantly available to over seven hundred "friends." It inspired a flurry of curious comments from various peers, not to mention a surge of embarrassment, anger, and anxiety from the target.