00:03:34.700but she wrote uh she wrote the secret lives of american girl like on social media um yeah she
00:03:41.840had she had done a lot of interviews between this like 13 to 19 age group was more concentrated
00:03:49.980sort of on the latter end of that range and in just listening to i mean in in the course of my
00:03:58.380research and in listening to uh your podcast episode that came out not that long ago in which
00:04:06.940you were talking to one of this one of the safety directors for meta i want oh yeah absolutely
00:04:13.320absolutely yeah and a really important point was made during the course of that episode that a 13
00:04:19.060year old is not a 17 year old right no right that there are that there need if we are going to
00:04:26.600address the potential pitfalls of social media, we need to do so in a way that is taking into
00:04:35.500account what the demographics are of the people that we are trying to regulate. And one of the
00:04:44.480things that I talk about in the book is that I think social media is almost operating,
00:04:51.140it's it's operating as sort of even um we're we're playing the blame game with social media
00:05:00.540about all of these social ills that girls are experiencing and i'm frustrated by
00:05:10.660here's an example yes yes here's an example social media is i think we can absolutely
00:05:20.480make the argument that it can magnify certain issues. It can, I mean, as girls are inundated
00:05:27.660with images of people's bodies, it can do the thing where it is magnifying body dissatisfaction.1.00
00:05:35.600It is making body image concerns difficult to navigate when there's such an inundation of
00:05:45.200information coming all the time. But I would also argue that social media is amongst the only spaces
00:05:52.900in which a bigger emphasis on body inclusivity and a conversation around something like body
00:06:04.500positivity or even body neutrality or even fat acceptance has come to the fore. That's the only
00:06:13.220space where we're seeing a counter narrative to that and i don't to me i feel like we're missing
00:06:22.560a really important uh aspect of what we're looking at here which is the other side of the coin is
00:06:30.380that girls have been online from the jump they they have created these spaces they have been
00:06:40.020cultural producers like since the onset of social media and it feels really
00:06:48.940it feels really dismissive and alarmist to me to be like we need to take girls offline
00:06:56.880because they are having negative experiences about their bodies but to me to me that symptom
00:07:06.420of girlhood experience and for tween girls was not generated by social media that is an old
00:07:18.000thing i mean like it is it is it is a tale as old as time it is a tale as old as time so
00:07:24.620when i study this youtube um trend of am i pretty or ugly yeah i want to i want to i want to dive
00:07:32.640into that because yeah i didn't know about this youtube trend yeah so i mean that is something i
00:07:37.360really i want to focus a lot on in this episode um i hear so much of what you're saying because
00:07:45.120i think i do think that instead of addressing systemic ills in society we're so often blaming
00:07:52.940the shiny thing right and so we're like oh it's social media it's not the fact that we don't have
00:07:59.280mental health services or that young women are culturally taught to think certain things
00:08:07.380about their bodies. It must be this thing that is wrong. So let's blame that. And I feel like that
00:08:14.740has happened for a long time with different modes of technology, right? So women's magazines were0.50
00:08:21.100the thing when we were coming up in the 80s and 90s, right? It's sort of the first argument I
00:08:26.820make in the book is that this it is indeed moral panic that we have seen sort of time and time
00:08:32.820again um i think it is worth paying attention to certainly worth paying attention to what we are
00:08:40.580seeing around the i mean the ban that is being put into place in australia and whether or not
00:08:46.580uh i mean i know the uk is watching that really closely to see if it's something that they might
00:08:51.640model. But I feel like there is there is something pretty insidious about the disproportionate
00:09:00.400attention on girls when we're actually not willing to have foundational conversations
00:09:06.940about what has catalyzed these things over time. Right. And and the idea of removing girls from0.96
00:09:16.640social media feels just like really not the approach not not not the answer maybe maybe not
00:09:29.000not the answer maybe a little alarmist too again instead of fixing or the way we treat and raise
00:09:35.480girls and also boys i think i'm just thinking about raising boys so much lately yeah and and
00:09:42.180And I could be wrong, but I think my book is one of the only ones at this juncture that actually talked to tween girls and invited them to share what they think about social media.
00:09:59.000And not unsurprisingly, they have things that they really love about it and they have things that they find exhausting or frustrating.
00:10:08.880And but I I don't think we're giving our young people enough credit.
00:10:13.600And well, and the research moves slow when research and publishing two things that move real slow and move really slow.
00:10:23.760So even in the course of doing the research and writing about this, I mean, we were in the midst of covid and these rectangles that we all have attached to us.
00:10:36.240Like these became these devices became a way for young people to socially stay afloat insofar as social media might be exacerbating mental health concerns, which I that needs to be a part of the conversation.
00:10:56.280It is also where young people are seeking out resources for mental health concerns. It is where they are finding community. It's where they are cultivating self-expression and identity.
00:11:13.100I think in many ways, social media is here to stay. I think it's a reflection of social life, which encapsulates the good, the bad, the mundane, the extreme. I think it does all of that.
00:11:32.680But I think my biggest purpose was to really bring girls to the fore, to bring tween girls to the fore, because they're prolific online, but we're not, if they're under 13, then they are protected, I mean, federally, and yet they are everywhere online.
00:11:56.020Everywhere. Yeah. So I was really interested in that juxtaposition of like, hold on a second, because this demographic of people are really active users of social media. And we don't know. We don't know how they feel about it. We don't know how they're characterizing their relationships. But as adults, we seem to be projecting a whole lot of concern on this demographic.
00:12:23.340So that was really my my motivation for learning more about it, because I felt like the scripts we were writing or or how we were projecting our adult centered fears were not telling the whole story.
00:12:42.260so right yeah right and they and they and they never are and i think the way that you looked at
00:12:49.460this youtube phenomenon am i pretty am i ugly that really it shows us a lot about how tween
00:12:58.360girls do use social media could you explain that to us yes um and i think and honestly i think that
00:13:04.680am i pretty or ugly trend even though it really peaked i mean at 10 years ago at this point
00:13:11.080it has found other versions of it have found their way to other platforms which i think is
00:13:19.340so interesting that in many ways it's not about the platform no i don't think it's ever about the
00:13:26.020platform and you know what i bring up all the time too when people talk about social media being
00:13:32.080dangerous for young women and kids i think social media is dangerous for everyone okay like i look
00:13:37.060look, full stop. Yeah. But I'm also like, you know what sucked when I was 11? Three-way calling.
00:13:44.860Like, you know, someone would call Cindy and Cindy wouldn't know that Bethany was on the phone.
00:13:51.920Yeah. And all of a sudden, Bethany is slagging off on Cindy and everyone hates everyone and is
00:13:57.660miserable and crying for days. Yeah. So there's always a way to torture someone and to torture
00:14:31.820toxic girl culture that in many ways are almost tongue in cheek like oh we get it everybody's in0.61
00:14:38.860on the joke this is how girls treat each other when they're of a certain age and then so so much
00:14:46.920i mean a lot of discourse around cyberbullying which isn't even defined uniquely in the literature
00:14:58.420across the board. It's really difficult to find definitions that distinguish between
00:15:04.300bullying and cyberbullying. But what I found so interesting about that was the way that girls0.98
00:15:11.160are conditioned to relate to one another, often in competition for male attention,
00:15:17.620sort of passive aggressiveness or rumor spreading or gossip or silent treatment or
00:15:25.540All of that that we've seen over time sort of, again, scripted onto how girls interact with one another, doesn't that map so beautifully onto social media in a way that gendered conditioning around bullying for boys does not?
00:15:45.820And so we were able to then say this is having a disproportionate impact on girls and how they're relating to one another, how they're interacting with each other online.
00:15:57.500Well, what I found was also that girls are using social media as a respite from bullying that they're experiencing in physical space, experiencing with people at school.
00:16:10.640it's just not as clean as that right or or the idea of the stranger on right this specter of
00:16:22.120the stranger and what girls are conditioned to fear they feel that they are very aware
00:16:28.720so i would and i thought that was so interesting in coming across this pretty or ugly youtube trend
00:16:35.160And I had a very similar reaction to what I imagine many, many adults feel as they came
00:16:41.720across it, or even people that are young, but still like slightly older than this tween
00:17:05.160okay we're back can you just break down what was happening online with the am i pretty or
00:17:20.260am i ugly thing best we can tell it really it kind of kicked off in 2011 2012 with a handful
00:17:28.700of YouTube videos and a couple that went really very viral of this young tween demographic
00:17:35.380from I mean we are in many ways we are assessing age we're reading age unless girls are saying
00:17:44.840explicitly I'm this old right so we're we're projecting in age but these are young tween
00:17:51.820girls approximation in the nine to 13 year old range, sort of between this sort of childhood
00:18:01.320and adolescent moment in which in which we know that interests around things like visibility
00:18:09.300and trends and celebrity and media that's a little beyond their years becomes very much
00:18:15.920interest, right? And certainly what peers think of them becomes a really significant interest.
00:18:24.400It is. You know, the crazy thing that I'm seeing with my five-year-old girl right now
00:18:29.180is, and I don't think we necessarily introduce these kinds of ideas in the house, but I think
00:18:35.660they're in the world everywhere. Her saying things like, I'm not pretty enough, or this girl in my
00:18:43.660class is prettier they they they everyone in my class likes the pretty people more than me
00:18:48.660it's really it's really insane i think how much it is in the culture yeah and well i have a five
00:18:56.000year old daughter too and she's not on social media right so so that is the same exactly my
00:19:02.880kid's not on social media my kid's never even seen social media so those and so it's just it
00:19:07.460exists in their classroom there's bullying in their classroom i've recently confirmed that it0.98
00:19:12.180sucks. It seems to be both looks based and academic bullying. Like I'm better at reading0.96
00:19:19.400than you. And I'm like, shut up. You all suck at reading. Come on. You're all beautiful and1.00
00:19:25.680you all suck at reading five year old girls. Let me get in there and I'll set some truths.1.00
00:19:32.140Yeah, there you go. Drop a truth bomb, little ladies. But no, they're not on social media1.00
00:19:36.620and it exists there yeah right so so you were you saw this pretty pretty ugly trend and did you talk
00:19:45.020to the tween girl or keep going keep going yeah well so i couldn't ethically reach out to those
00:19:49.320people i could you know i couldn't um that would be i mean in terms of research ethically that
00:19:57.760would have been potentially very harmful right or like to reach out to the people that actually
00:20:03.600made videos because I didn't know I mean approximation is that given that most of
00:20:11.200these girls whose videos I studied were under the age of 13 they were very likely using a parental
00:20:18.140account or an old you know people who had created YouTube accounts and then they were using them
00:20:24.240via that but it was a trend that occurred on YouTube primarily and best that we can tell
00:20:31.980sort of based on taglines and algorithm and who participated in it, there were more than a million
00:20:37.860of these videos. I mean, enough so that it really picked up quite a bit of attention across news
00:20:44.460media and was considered a trend, right? So I became really interested in this. I started
00:20:51.100watching them quite systematically. And the thing that I found so striking was how formulaic
00:21:00.020the the script was uh in a lot of ways so to me it was very clear that girls were watching other
00:21:08.080girls make these videos and then making their own um there was uh there were also an interesting
00:21:16.620sort of off offshooter faction of the trend was to make parody videos of girls that were then
00:21:22.680Oh, that's fun. That's making fun of other girls anyway. But I just thought it was so interesting that for so long, girls have been, let's be real. We live in a society where we're like, oh, girls can do and be and they can do all of these things. And ideologically, we're like, hooray.0.92
00:21:44.920Well, we did live in that society until January of this year.
00:22:35.520I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s, and that feeling of like, you can kick ass with the right shoes was still very present. We were selling girl power. We weren't demonstrating it structurally in action.0.95
00:22:55.060And girls are off. We who is it's Maddie Kahn, who wrote the book, but did a wonderful op ed about girls organizing sort of revolutionary girls over time. And she says, we love girls as consumers, but like we don't love them as political subjects. Right. She said that to that's not verbatim, but that was the idea.
00:23:18.580No, that's that's the gist of what Maddie said. Totally. Yeah. And I I was so interested in how girls were asking this question and how they would frame it as I can't trust my friends. I can't trust my family. I need someone to tell me the truth outside outside outside of my little world.
00:23:43.340I need someone to tell me the truth. Am I pretty or am I ugly? And again, something that is.
00:23:52.920It's something that I think about. I'm just talking off the cuff here because I don't know
00:23:56.740how to figure it out. When I first had my first daughter, I kept thinking about just like the
00:24:01.080little things that I cooed at her when she was a baby or that I heard other people say. And it's
00:24:05.840like, oh, you're so pretty. Hey, pretty girl, you look pretty. Like without thinking about it,
00:24:10.660so subconsciously uh pretty is just an adjective that we throw into the ether around girls
00:24:17.680so often and then then i tried to you know counter it with you're so smart and brave and funny yeah
00:24:24.220um but i bring this this up to my friends all the time they're like i know i know it's just like
00:24:29.120hey pretty girl like a thing that you almost say by instinct so maybe we are the ones that put it
00:24:35.900in there really early I mean I think we are not we don't exist in a vacuum in that way yeah like
00:24:43.100we are absolutely a part of it um and I also think it I believe me I'm not I don't love this
00:24:52.160but from what I found like being pretty is really important to girls they recognize that
00:25:00.920And whether or not they feel it sort of, if they're feeling it intrinsically, individually, what the culture, what the society is laying bare for them is that that is what they are supposed to be.
00:25:16.140And that is what makes them successful. Or even more insidiously, it's what makes their accomplishments legible. Like, oh, look, she's really good at math and she's really pretty.
00:25:32.060Right. Oh, my gosh. This beauty queen is also a physicist.0.99
00:25:35.760Totally. Totally. Right. So it's at this nexus of empowerment and disempowerment where we say, oh, beauty is internal and you're you're so wonderful just the way you are. And like, yes, I would like that to be real.1.00
00:25:53.160like aesthetic capital is very very present for it's like it is how they are it is in many ways
00:26:03.240how they're like figuring out who they are so when i saw these pretty or ugly videos i was like
00:26:09.820this is not they are not they are asking am i pretty or ugly but they are also asking who am i
00:26:18.380They're like they're trying to figure that out. And the thing I think is so striking that we forget is that whether you're using a phone or a laptop or a tablet, if you are creating a video, you are looking at yourself first.
00:26:52.840And I'm not, I give girls so much credit, but they are not adults.
00:26:57.800And we need to be there to help with not only that cultural literacy and social literacy, but that media literacy. What can they teach us? What can we help with? How can we create a more dynamic discussion around this?
00:27:12.960And the thing that I found is that girls are doing that. They're having conversations with each other, with their caregivers, with their stakeholders. But the pretty or ugly trend I found so remarkable because I was like, these girls are filming themselves asking this question and then making the decision to hit publish.0.52
00:27:37.640because every video i saw was on a public account right like it was available for anybody to see
00:27:44.280anybody to comment on some of them had very few views some of them had millions of views
00:27:50.880right like and i did not do a systematic study of the comments because i was just like i can't it's
00:27:57.240that it would it would it would kill your soul but it's and also it's just like the absolute
00:28:02.900wild west of like yeah some people are commenting on there to like sell their own product or1.00
00:28:08.000right but a lot of the response was why are these girls doing this where are the parents1.00
00:28:17.080um how are we allowing them to to make public youtube videos in this way and to me maybe it's0.99
00:28:26.300i but i stand by it right like whether it's a misplaced analysis or not i think there's1.00
00:28:32.080agency going on here in in how girls are creating these videos they're producing them
00:28:38.500they're choosing to hit publish at bare minimum joe they are participating in a dialogue in this
00:28:48.040cultural discursive moment that so often happens around them but doesn't happen with them and now
00:28:56.460they are inserting their voices we maybe don't like the question except it's a question that0.83
00:29:03.840girls have been asking for a century or more in some way shape or form and it's also what they're
00:29:11.380being sold so to me there's something that's really interesting at the nexus of the age that
00:29:18.700they are the kind of foray into social media they're seeing other girls do this i think it's
00:29:26.600play i think some of it is play and i'm i'm reticent to be so dismissive of that because
00:29:35.980then we do things like oh girls are only interested in appearances that's so vapid
00:29:41.840we I and I also I'm curious you know was part of this also girls wanting to
00:29:52.280join in the community aspect of it right so I I want to be a part of a thing that other girls are
00:30:00.100a part of and I don't think we could put too fine a point on the desire to be seen
00:30:04.760right you're playing exactly exactly and that is also what is being laid bare for them right
00:30:11.380when we look at young young people that are influencers there that's not again that's not
00:30:18.600coming to them in a vacuum or um i've been paying more attention i did an interview a while back
00:30:26.820around this sephora epidemic this moment of like young girls doing skincare routines and
00:30:33.980And does that make me like, like, I mean, it does make me go.
00:30:41.180But then I'm also my daughter wants to put on makeup with me.
00:30:46.340My daughter wants to do facials with me.
00:30:48.680And it's a part of joining in and community.
00:30:52.740I like what you're saying so much because, again, I hate so much of social media.
00:30:59.800Right. But it exists and the train has left the station and it's here to stay.
00:31:02.880And are we just blaming social media instead of blaming the culture, which in the culture hasn't changed since the beginning of women's media 100, 150 years ago with magazines that told us how to get the smoothest legs from a shave so we would, you know, look like a baby seal.
00:31:25.860And now, I mean, and it's always been like, I think about every Cosmo cover I've ever seen, which is like half tricks to drive him wild.
00:31:38.700This like very heteronormative, you know, like I'm so excited, Joe, by like publications like Teen Vogue that are doing like real political reports.
00:31:50.480Oh, they're doing such great work. Yeah. I mean, we have Fertessa Latifi on all the time, like real, actual work.
00:31:55.580And girls want to be a part of that conversation. I think we fear girls in a lot of ways. They're a very powerful bunch.
00:32:05.660And they have always manifested resistance through the things that they have created. I think this is a version of that.
00:32:16.820maybe it doesn't appear that way on the surface right away but for example when we do things like
00:32:24.080that 12 year old girl shouldn't be putting herself on youtube and making it public because we don't
00:32:30.180know who could be watching her to me and this is an argument i make all the time that i say all the
00:32:35.440time and also i wish that we didn't live in a world with pedophiles sure and and to me that's
00:32:41.620like why are we putting the onus and the responsibility on her on her and the and how1.00
00:32:48.120she's playing around how access to technology is powerful and girls need to be a part of it1.00
00:32:56.940so to me there's a real political danger in taking girls off of it because we were making the1.00
00:33:05.880argument, oh, it's bad for their mental health. Are we talking to them? Are we measuring that0.87
00:33:14.140in multiple ways that give us both a macro and a micro picture of that? Because the research that
00:33:23.200we have is not unequivocal. It is finding different things. It is telling us that content matters
00:33:31.360more than amount of time um i mean and certainly i think about people that have been more marginalized
00:33:40.980or where they are in the world and like their spatial realities being able to connect to
00:33:46.480community to participate i just think that insofar as social media has a lot of pitfalls it has a lot
00:33:56.440of potential too and i worry that i worry about how that's um a story that's not being told now
00:34:04.460i know i'm talking a bit of a big game i have children that have not entered this realm yet
00:34:10.860so as a researcher it's okay there's men who've written these books who don't even have kids
00:34:16.400correct correct and i have some different opinions than some of the men who have written these books
00:34:22.820Um, but, and I just, uh, I don't know. I, I think, I think girls are so creative and funny and have, have also demonstrated. And that's another thing. It's like girls demonstrate an interest in makeup.
00:34:45.980like but again we but we create this sort of idea of well makeup is shallow or make you're right like
00:34:52.780if we and yet and yet and yet makeup is everywhere and and also i don't know like if we strip it away
00:35:01.280makeup is makeup right like and it's and it's used for so many different things it's also now
00:35:08.840being sold like utilizing a much broader multiplicity of bodies and a consumer like
00:35:15.820if you go to a sephora and you look at the models who are you know outside of the store and the
00:35:22.740image it's a it's a variety of folks the messaging being the makeup is for everybody which is for a
00:35:31.060bottom line like good for you cap right like good for you capitalism for you capitalism turns out
00:35:36.980it was always proud of capitalism right every time but it always wins every time well because
00:35:43.040it's amoral it will do whatever it doesn't care it will go wherever people want it to go um but
00:35:50.180i think the interesting thing about that is we've associated makeup with the feminine and by doing
00:35:56.060that we've devalued it because we devalue the feminine when you strip it away it's like makeup
00:36:01.200or having knowledge of it isn't how is that any different than knowing a set of baseball
00:36:07.500statistics yes at the end of the day right like or or and i'm i'm careful to point fingers here
00:36:16.120of around like different forms of social media but we're not studying boys in the same way
00:36:21.660we're not no we're not in the same way um and i think that there if if we are going to take
00:36:29.980a holistic and nuanced approach to this, then we need to understand what's happening on platforms
00:36:36.820that have been historically more popular among boys and men. But what we see is that YouTube is
00:36:44.900popular across the board. Nothing can touch it, right? And that makes sense to me because it's
00:36:52.700just constant flow of content. It's educational. It's all the things. YouTube is all the things.
00:36:59.980TikTok is quite popular among the province of youth and Snapchat.
00:37:04.940And what I had found about Snapchat is that girls are just talking to their friends all day long.
00:37:09.460Like, that's just, you know, they have their own systems of language.0.97
00:37:15.580They recognize it as a mode of support.
00:37:27.160That is also not symptomatic of social media in and of itself. That is how people establish relationships over time. And it's also how we see it across the life course with women of like how women are supposed to engage with one another.
00:37:44.580I think sort of the overarching feeling is, I'm just not convinced we're asking the right questions. Or I think we're being critical of something that is still in its infancy. And I will eat my arm like 20 years from now if it's like, okay, it's really clear social media is destroying us, I will stand by it, right?0.97
00:38:08.300But for now, I think girls are a part of it and we need to find ways to make sure that they feel like they have a voice in what they are doing online.
00:38:25.160And that I think a lot of our concern is misplaced or magnified in a way that goes against what I found in what girls are actually doing online and which the research bears out.
00:38:42.820Right. A lot of the research bears this out.
00:38:44.920So. Well, talk to me about some of this research. Yeah. Talk to me about. Actually, let's take a quick break. And when we get back, I want to hear about some of this research. I want to hear about what tween girls have told you. Totally. About using social media. Totally.
00:38:59.820okay we're back tell me a little bit about what the tween girls are saying when you ask them about1.00
00:39:19.580social media because i think that is often the best research hearing from actual young women0.97
00:39:27.120about about how this impacts their lives. Right. Yeah. Thank you. And one of the I mean,0.52
00:39:33.900one of the things I put forth in the book is that it's one of its limitations is that
00:39:39.100it's not it's not a massive quantitative study. And even but and I don't even think of that as
00:39:46.900a limitation. I think we need that kind of research that is doing like much bigger sort
00:39:52.920of survey response kind of stuff. And we need the rich qualitative stuff that's actually having
00:39:58.400conversations. So I had the opportunity to conduct in-depth interviews with 26 girls
00:40:05.980between the ages of 10 and 13. And I found a lot of variations on similar themes. So they would
00:40:16.660talk to me about how, for example, they navigated something like privacy versus what they make
00:40:23.280public. And what I found is that girls are very, they're quite thoughtful about this.
00:40:31.280Whether it is caretakers or peers or school, they are not ignorant of the potential risks
00:40:44.220that befall them online like they understand um the threat of strangers they understand the threat
00:40:53.460of predatory behavior and i just want to offer for a moment that the vast majority of girls i spoke to
00:41:01.320are only in contact with people on social media that they know in physical space right just right
00:41:10.420Just like many of us. Right. Like it's a way of being in network. If they were making content public, it was to be playful, to be silly, to engage interests.
00:41:25.540I remember one of my interviewees, Jessie, holy smokes, she's got some jets on her.0.99
00:41:49.260And she would have conversations about or with her mom about establishing a YouTube channel and what that would look like, because she saw it as a way.
00:42:00.440This is a way for me to engage my interest, to get feedback, to gain visibility.
00:42:07.660And I saw that with girls who were interested in art and computer coding and comedic play and the kinds of things that they would do with their siblings.
00:42:19.260Much of it is a way to play around with visibility, to build identity.
00:42:30.680And so they were very intentional about this is what I do in public or this is a post that I will make public versus these are the kinds of things I'm doing every day with close circles of friends that are private.
00:42:47.200um and and the application would be different the platform would be different the kinds of
00:42:54.180decision making they are doing around that they were really able to talk me through it
00:42:59.820in a way that well and they were like i i remember um uh one of the girls we were talking about
00:43:07.920facebook she was like oh yeah facebook is social media for old people i was which right you're
00:43:14.500Right. And when I was doing the research, it was still musically. It was like before musically was like merged with TikTok. And girls loved it. They got to be they were silly. They were singing. They were dancing. They were playing because that's what they were seeing. And they wanted to be a part of that.
00:43:36.480So the things that they found frustrating was the competition around popularity, was the competition around visibility, what they saw on the part of other girls as sort of jockeying for male attention.
00:43:53.720um so sort of an underlying desirability politics going on and how popularity was mapping onto
00:44:02.840social media use um i wonder if i can find the quote because i think it was just really
00:44:08.640um oh i bet i can uh it was just really interesting to hear the way
00:44:17.620this particular girl was talking about it um and they didn't all love it they did not all
00:44:29.260love social media so this was a this was a 10 year old girl um a 10 year old white girl and
00:44:35.200i talked to um in the course of my research i talked to 13 black girls uh 10 white girls and
00:44:41.740three latina girls um and so there were different i mean certainly race was an important aspect of0.98
00:44:49.580how girls are navigating uh social media uh experiences but this gal genie is her pseudonym0.75
00:44:56.580in the book um and she talks about how girls are more attached to their phones than boys
00:45:03.860and she says it's mostly girls that are popular at school and they want to change themselves so
00:45:10.140they can be popular because like everybody wants to be popular and swarmed by boys i guess and
00:45:15.800middle school is the worst if you're not popular no one is friends with you and if you're popular
00:45:20.780then everybody's friends with the friends with you so they want to have more friends and i ask
00:45:25.860why do you think being popular and having friends might be important to girls and genie says well
00:45:30.880girls think it's going to affect their future oh can you tell me more about that and she said so
00:45:38.240if a girl is popular, they're going to get a good boy and they're going to get married to him.1.00
00:45:43.000And it's just going to go from there. And posting on YouTube can help with that
00:45:46.460because you can get followers and subscribers and stuff. You can be more popular.
00:45:52.460I thought that was astounding. I mean, just a really, wow, fascinating reflection on what is,
00:46:05.340I mean, and you cannot tell me that that is social media in and of itself. That's a 10 year old girl talking about what it means to be pretty, what it means to be popular, what this means for her prospects over time and over 20 years in the future.
00:46:25.880easily so and and and so that kind of that kind of astuteness was showing up throughout the book
00:46:36.800of girls think about these things they think about the impacts that it's having they had
00:46:43.480really insightful responses because I also showed all of my interviewees I showed them pretty or
00:46:50.300ugly videos. I showed them a sample of the trend because I was also studying videos from the trend.
00:46:57.680So in those interviews, I would show them these videos and get their take on it. And it was
00:47:03.920fascinating because it was so paradoxical. They were like, oh, she's just seeking attention.
00:47:08.880She's like, she already knows she's pretty. She's being an attention seeker, which they categorically
00:47:14.380situated as being a bad thing. But then I would ask them, well, why do you think someone would
00:47:20.480post one of these videos? And they would say, well, it's probably because she's getting bullied
00:47:25.720at school. And so she wants to know. She just wants someone else to tell her. So that's something
00:47:32.540that I found so interesting amongst tween girls in general was the way that paradox was playing0.78
00:47:40.980out not only in the videos but also in interviews and just with every breath like there was
00:47:47.260contradiction in how they were experiencing their worlds and i think that's the most important
00:47:54.380thing to recognize because a tween girl is being sold empowerment she is being sold girl power
00:48:03.960but she's disempowered in her life like doesn't get a great deal of choice there was a really
00:48:14.440wonderful new york times series um called being 13 uh which is a series of articles i was looking
00:48:21.980at sort of this tween girl embodiment and experience um and one of the authors for one
00:48:28.480of those pieces wrote that tween girl can be encapsulated by you're at a fancy hair appointment
00:48:34.720eating an uncrustable and i was like that is perfect like that is exactly the feeling that
00:48:42.320girls are navigating of having interests that are beyond their years of wanting to be seen
00:48:49.440of wanting to be a part of what is happening around them and at the same time feeling very
00:49:01.400much like children. They absolutely were deferent to authority figures in their lives of
00:49:08.600I have a boundary on social media. Privacy is important to me. I talk about it with my dad,
00:49:16.620with my mom i talk about it with my friends so that was certainly a big finding was how they
00:49:22.180were navigating all at once this push for visibility but also this emphasis on privacy
00:49:27.760being really important another thing i found was how girls are defining bullying behavior differently
00:49:34.320from the world around right like how they how they might read something as just being
00:49:43.200kind of mundane friend drama might be understood as bullying amongst adults but amongst adults
00:49:51.900right yeah but just for them it's tuesday for them it's tuesday correct yes um that was really
00:49:58.980interesting and really kind of hard to pin down uh because definitions of bullying are so
00:50:04.860they're just hazy they're hazy they're hazy we don't know we don't know what got us there right
00:50:11.840And I think a lot of times they don't know what got them there. Right. And that there's a spectrum of experience in that way, that range. I mean, and that there have been absolutely catastrophic outcomes related to that. But those are also the stories that are getting told the most.
00:50:29.400Right. Which is unsurprising in terms of how media will sensationalize things when the reality is that that's very, very rare. It's very rare. And not to dismiss those experiences, that's absolutely awful. And it needs to be taken seriously.
00:50:50.540But I also think we really need to understand more from young people how they are defining the conditions of their experiences online and that most of them, if they were seeing bullying behavior or even experiencing it, they were far more likely to experience it at school in physical spaces than they were online.
00:51:15.780And it was with friend groups and Snapchat circles and making a funny video with their sister where they were finding play and respite and levity. Right. So, yeah, it was just it's just not as simple as it's a minefield on social media.
00:51:38.860Yeah. Right. Right. And it really I think social media, as you said, does often give us a scapegoat about not addressing larger systemic issues.
00:51:47.800Yeah. In the culture. Yeah. Like how we're emphasizing marriage as being the pathway to success.
00:51:54.480So much more to dig into here. You're going to have to come back for a whole other episode.
00:51:59.940And I don't even know how long we've been to. Oh, my goodness. It's been it's been a long time. I know the time just flew.
00:52:05.060it totally flew um i would here here's just this is one little thing that i that i really loved and
00:52:14.060i thought it was so great um i asked one of the questions i asked at the end of my interviews
00:52:22.040how girls would feel if social media suddenly disappeared and i think that's something we
00:52:29.220really need to pay attention to because we theoretically have global examples of where
00:52:34.920this is happening right um for young people uh and when i asked them they reacted
00:52:42.040in a lot of ways one of them yeah i want to hear how they react one of them emphatically groaned
00:52:49.300oh okay another one said very plainly i would freak out another one said if i didn't have
00:52:57.240social media oh my lord I just need social media I would be so bored I would probably have a heart
00:53:02.760attack another one said if someone took it away I would not survive oh wow and another one said
00:53:08.920it would be so hard like changing my whole life and I think that that is such a takeaway because
00:53:16.860it's part of it is this for this generation for alpha and z of where we are now they have
00:53:27.260absolutely grown up with this and i certainly think i mean i didn't get the opportunity to
00:53:33.780really write about covid in the sense of doing my research during covid maybe that'll be another
00:53:39.660book of like how what covid did to solidify social media in young people's lives because
00:53:48.280that is an absolutely crucial variable and to me it feels i'm nervous about the idea of
00:53:56.620young people being categorically taken off social media under the age of 16
00:54:01.380when they lived through a global pandemic and that was where they were finding
00:54:09.200community. I mean, what a responsibility. Listen, making sure that we are keeping
00:54:17.760immunocompromised and older folks and elderly folks and the people that we love in our lives0.99
00:54:23.920and folks with disabilities who are more compromised by COVID, like, yes, yes, yes,
00:54:29.160we have a responsibility to that care. And a 13-year-old was also holding on to that responsibility
00:54:37.620and not able to go to school like not able to connect with their with their people and
00:54:45.720i i do think we need a lot more understanding of what social media has meant and what it has
00:54:53.880consolidated and solidified for people um especially in the in the midst and wake of
00:55:00.160of covid um what i found was that they love it there are things that they don't like about it
00:55:06.260but they can't imagine life without it at this point.
00:56:10.020I think and I think the last thing I'll say is, I mean, certainly it's an academic book, but I wanted it to be accessible.
00:56:18.380I hope if people do choose to read it, that they find it that way.
00:56:21.900And it also goes well beyond social media.
00:56:24.840There's a lot that I dig into here around the cultural conditions that surround social media.
00:56:31.520So I hope folks, whether they are stakeholders of tween girls and caregivers, educators, parents, I hope people can find interest in it because my hope is that it also illuminates some things around gendered conditioning more broadly.
00:56:48.820right um and and how girls are how tween girls are navigating this like very confusing
00:56:56.380time of life and and moment that they're in yeah and how they've been navigating it for a long time
00:57:04.360i don't think that much has changed except for the existence of social media but it's just a
00:57:08.940new platform and i i see my girl going through so much of the same stuff that i went through
00:57:14.580Yeah. I think it's a moment of like, we really need to stay tuned and see what its overall impacts are going to be, whether net negative, net positive, or dare I say it, neutral.
00:57:30.140Maybe neutral because it's a reflection of social life. So for as many reasons as we have to be concerned about the impacts of social media, I want to I just want to also offer that there there's a lot of power in it, too. And and I think young people deserve to be a part of that.
00:57:49.420and that is all we have for today this episode gave me a lot to think about and like i said
00:57:58.260before i'm not there yet i've got a while before my kids are on social media and who knows what
00:58:05.940the world is gonna look like then i mean elon musk might own us by then and rfk junior could
00:58:13.800have us all in wellness camps, which sometimes, sometimes I fantasize about those wellness camps.
00:58:20.040I do. Thank you for being here today. I appreciate all of you. If you love this show,
00:58:25.020please share it with friends. Please leave us a review on all of the review places because it
00:58:30.040strangely helps. It really does. And remember to subscribe to the Over the Influence newsletter,
00:58:35.900where we have more in-depth interviews, behind-the-scenes conversations, a fun book club,