The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  Another senior at Mack’s university, Nikki, tells a similar story. “I used to just do stuff [online] for attention,” she says. “But now that I’m older, you know, I watch what I say. I watch what I post online, due to the fact that I know that employers will be looking at your profiles now. So I make sure I don’t curse online or anything like that, because I want to be hireable and able to get a job someday.” Nikki won’t ever post anything bad about anyone else, either. She rattles off nearly the same social media no-nos as Mack but adds to that list the importance of not posting anything “emotional,” which, she explains, means anything negative, like if you’ve had a bad day or you’re feeling angry.

  Nikki has learned some of these lessons because she is a resident assistant.

  “Now, working in residential life, you know that they can look us up and they’re like, if we see something crazy, we can possibly get in trouble for [it],” she explains. She says it is part of her job to be Facebook friends with certain people, like the administrators who hired her, so they can monitor what their staff members are doing and saying online. Because of this, Nikki has become hyperaware of what she posts and its potential repercussions—she needs her job and doesn’t want to lose it. “I’m definitely mindful for that, and I try not to post emotions when I’m feeling bad,” she says. “I don’t want to say anything that I cannot take back.”

  So what does Nikki feel she’s allowed to post?

  “I will post positive things that are going on in my life,” she says. “Stuff like, how I’m blessed. You know, stuff that’s positive. I just try to post positive things, not negative things.” “Positive things” are basically all Nikki thinks she can put up online, and she returns quickly to what she must not post. “I won’t post drinks,” Nikki goes on. “You won’t catch me in a bar having a drink in my hand or, you know, with illegal substances. Intimate stuff with a man—I won’t post [any] of that.” “I would not post sexual-type pictures. You would not catch me doing [any] of that.” I heard a lot from students about “the bikini picture.” The consensus is that you are not supposed to post bikini pictures because they reflect negatively on you. Words like “trashy” and “slutty” are thrown around when students mention these photos. Yet many young women at this particular institution had posted those dreaded bikini photos at some point in their pasts, and only recently learned that they had to come down to avoid ruining the chance of getting a job in the future.

  Sheena used to get into fights on Facebook before she came to college and learned better. She spoke of instances in which she “was kind of angry” and “lashed out” at someone. She’d put her “business out there for everybody to see.” When she was younger, she “was really vulgar and inappropriate and childish and cursed and used a lot of slang.” All evidence of this has since been deleted. “Because of the schooling that I’ve been doing,” Sheena explains. “I don’t want to put that [on social media] because I don’t want them to judge me or feel that I’m not appropriate to do the job that I want to do.” Sheena has her university to thank for helping her develop an online filter. “I think [my social media presence] changed more when I started going to school and started to realize that I needed to be more professional and not so high school, middle school.” One thing that’s changed dramatically is how often Sheena posts—very infrequently now. And when she does, it’s to post pictures of her nieces and nephews participating in activities such as going to an art museum or trick-or-treating.

  Like Mack, Sheena notices a big difference between the kinds of things her peers at school post and the kinds of things posted by people from home who are not attending college. “There’s a lot of sex,” Sheena tells me. “Bathroom selfie shots, the bra, the bathing suits… . Just, have a little bit of class when you [take selfies]. Don’t be drinking or doing drugs or just posing vulgarly. I have a lot of friends who I’ve deleted here recently because of it, because of nasty pictures. Or dudes even. Some of my guy friends on Facebook like to download girls shaking their butts or purring or [performing] sexual acts and I’m just like, I don’t really want that on my page, so I’m going to delete you.”

  Sheena is always thinking about her online image. “I mean, now I do,” she says. “Before I didn’t. I didn’t even care! I was posting pictures at the club and everything else. But now I am concerned with it because, like I said, I have professors who are on Facebook, people I intern for on Facebook, and I don’t want them to see me in a state where I’m not comfortable, or if I were drunk or hung over and someone took a picture of me. I wouldn’t want that on Facebook because I wouldn’t want them to see that part of me.” Sheena gives credit to her professors for helping to change her ways. They have explained how important it is to be aware of your online image, especially for employment reasons, and their advice has been very specific. “Other people in the professional field have Facebook, too, so if you wouldn’t want them to see certain things on Facebook, then I would advise you to don’t put it on Facebook,” Sheena says she’s been told. Her professors have also advised their students “to create a new account that you are more willing to let professional people see.” Sheena has become very cognizant of anything associated with her real name. “My Facebook is my name, my government name, and some people create Facebooks with ‘Weird Cupcake,’ ‘Sweetie Pie,’ stuff like that. So I kind of thought, well, okay, if I’m going to have a friend social Facebook, then that would be appropriate, but if I was going to have a more professional Facebook, then I would have to use my real name. And since my real name is already being used, I kind of want to filter who’s on my page and what they’re posting and stuff like that.”

  Sheena chose the professional over the social, and she has been trying to teach the same values she’s learned at her public university to her nieces and nephews, too, but she worries that they’re “not really getting it.” Then again, she says, “I didn’t get it either.”

  Teaching college students not to document illegal activity is certainly worthwhile, as is talking to them about how their online behavior can affect their professional futures. This has become common knowledge for privileged high school students, so providing it to less-privileged students on campus is a matter of better late than never because employers, not to mention other gatekeepers, are watching.

  College students who learned these lessons more recently tend to feel proud of their reformed behavior, but at the same time, they also display a sense of superiority in relation to the “people back home” who don’t know any better. By comparing themselves with their high school friends, these students can see the gap that college has created between them and their erstwhile classmates, and like to point this gap out. They are learning practical skills about how to get ahead, and they feel fortunate about this in ways that students at the other participating universities take for granted or find exhausting, since they’ve long ago started filtering themselves online and have begun to resent the need to do so.

  But what about those “friends back home” who aren’t college-bound and who aren’t getting this lesson? With social media infiltrating our social and professional lives more and more each day, how will this affect the job prospects of those young adults who never go to college? Will lessons around how to professionalize one’s social media accounts ever reach them? Or will the gap between the college graduates and everyone else simply grow even wider?

  Then, of course, we should also wonder: Does the professionalization of social media defeat its entire purpose? Are these platforms really “social” anymore? Is it healthy for young adults to gear everything they put up online toward their eventual employers, especially when so much of their lives are lived online? And what are we (and they) losing when this space that was created for social connection and self-expression is no longer a good place for exactly that—at least not when it’s attached to a person’s real name?

  WHERE KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

  There is only one university where I consistently met students who are
politically and socially active online, and who think of social media as a tool for speaking freely. They don’t seem to think that being opinionated or politically active on social media will affect them or their futures—or at least not in a way egregious enough to dissuade them from posting. It is the most academically prestigious university—by a significant margin—out of all the institutions I visited. The young women and men I interviewed there are some of the top students in the United States, the ones who receive perfect scores on their SATs and are so academically engaged that, at times, it can be detrimental to their social lives. Their school is at the opposite end of the ratings and economic spectrum from the public university where the administration and faculty were working so hard to undo the damage that unfiltered, uncensored social media profiles might cause its students.

  It’s also true that this prestigious school boasts just as many anonymous college Twitter feeds and college Facebook groups—as well as a very active Yik Yak—as all of the others, spaces where people confess the good, the bad, and the ugly. I met a number of students at this university who struggle with the usual hang-ups about wanting to get “likes” and trying to appear happy, even if they aren’t. In many ways, these students seem a lot like those I met elsewhere, but they also seem to feel freer to be honest about all sorts of views and social involvements.

  Bo, for example, feels it is important—almost a duty—to express his political views online. “I use Facebook a lot, and everything I put on Facebook is either a joke or something funny, or something political,” he tells me. “I feel like it’s some combination of actually trying to convince people and just expressing what I think.” Sometimes Bo is disappointed when he posts something political and it doesn’t get as much of a response as he thought it would—though he does dread, a bit, the thought of getting a really angry response. “I just try to say what I think and then if it’s too controversial, tone it down, but then not very much either,” he says. “And then engage with people when they say stuff.” Bo’s posts about Israel have sparked the most heated reactions so far, and he both loves this and feels stressed out by it. But he still considers it important to express himself openly online.

  The other, more prominent trend I notice at this school is that several of the students seem completely disengaged from social media (three out of the fourteen students I interviewed have no accounts and no interest whatsoever—they live as though social media doesn’t exist). And if they are engaged, their ability to maintain a certain objective distance is pronounced. In fact, they spend a good deal of time thinking critically about their lives on social media—they can’t seem to help themselves. If they care about “likes,” they are philosophical and self-aware about pondering what it means about our culture and their generation.

  May—a fairly active user of Facebook—marvels at the ways in which we are able to create “new identities” through social media and then simply decide to “discard them.” This is both good and bad, in her opinion, and her capacity to analyze what this means on a broader scale is fascinating. But her ability to think critically about social media and her own role in it also seems to give her confidence about her relationship to it; it gives her a greater sense of control, one that is markedly different from what I’ve seen elsewhere.

  Then I meet Lin, who speaks at length about her many “metafeelings” about social media, her struggles to not get too sucked in to caring about “likes,” or take too many selfies, or spend too much of the day comparing herself to others. Lin is engaged on social media, but also can analyze her engagement and that of her peers at such a high level that she seems to feel protected by her ability to critique it. There are also many other students who speak of the ways they’ve subverted the rules of each platform or simply sidestepped the drama altogether because it does not serve their intellectual purposes in any useful way.

  I interviewed students across all thirteen institutions capable of thinking critically about social media to varying degrees—it’s a key reason the interviews turned out to be so fascinating. But I also got the sense from many of these same students that their first opportunity—their first invitation—to reflect critically on the role of social media in their lives came during that very same interview. Prior to meeting with me, they’d never really taken the time or had a forum in which to do this. They are capable when asked, but no one had asked before. Many of them seemed to have “eureka”-type moments in the interview room, and lots of students commented after the interview was over that they’d never thought about social media in those ways before, or realized they held those opinions or feelings until they found themselves speaking about them.

  But at this highly prestigious institution, students are used to engaging critically with everything. They don’t need to be invited—they just do it. And knowledge—in the form of critical analysis—quite literally seems to translate into power. Being able to think clearly about social media, believing that they have the intellectual skills to best Mark Zuckerberg at his own game and understand some of the more manipulative ways that social media infiltrates our lives and relationships, gives them a healthier, more empowered relationship to it. Plus, their academics seem far more enticing and central to their lives than anything that can happen on social media; and this, too, provides them a sort of protective shield that I did not see among the rest of the interviewees—at least not so consistently.

  It made me wonder: Why is this group of students so different? Why this particular school and none of the others? Is it really due to the fact that the academic and intellectual gifts among these students are so outstanding that they provide a safety net of sorts for students’ future job prospects? Is it, in part, because these students aren’t as concerned about their social lives as the students I met at the other schools, since their studies took precedence above all else? Is it simply because they attend such a prestigious institution that they feel more protected by their greater access to postcollege networks that will bring them professional advantages?

  I asked every student I interviewed whether, during their time at college, any of their professors had discussed social media and how it’s affecting our lives and our world. I’m not talking about the “professionalism talks,” but about academic discussions of social media. It was very rare for a student to answer this question by saying yes. Occasionally, I found a student majoring in journalism who’d learned about social media in a classroom setting, or a student who’d taken a class that expressly engaged social media or media in general. But most students simply said no, they’d never had this opportunity; or if they said yes, they followed this by explaining that many professors forbid smartphone use in class—but the simple ban announced at the beginning of the semester was the only time the subject came up. The other affirmative responses almost always arose in the context of a Career Center seminar on the importance of Facebook Cleanups and G-rated social media profiles.

  But critical analysis about the role of social media and new technologies in our lives and world, and how it affects the way we construct our identities and relate to others? These subjects were nearly nonexistent in classroom conversation in these college students’ experience—despite how much social media has taken over their lives (and everyone else’s). Students are being taught to “professionalize” accounts attached to their names, but they are not being challenged to think about social media during their studies. This was true for the young people at this prestigious institution as well, but these students had come to college with such a high level of intellectual engagement that it seemed natural for them to apply those skills to social media too. It’s just what they do.

  Yet, if knowledge is indeed power, we must ask ourselves if a Career Center presentation about how to maintain a spotless social media presence is enough to prepare our students and other young adults to effectively handle social media. Or even whether promoting the professionalization of social media could be detrimental because it supports the idea that appearances
are everything, and reality should be hidden. We are giving college students a kind of education around social media, but it rarely crosses the threshold of the classroom, the place where—at least in theory—they should be learning to think critically about the world. There is both an intellectual and an emotional benefit to such engagement. While it may not prevent young adults from struggling with social media, the capacity to process what’s going on intellectually can help them feel as if they are the ones steering the ship, navigating social media, and that they are not merely at its mercy.

  There is another side to this professionalization for students, too: the feeling that they need not only to avoid mistakes but also to actively market themselves. And that has its own complications, as we shall see.

  3

  MY NAME IS MY BRAND AND MY BRAND IS HAPPINESS!

  You are a brand, and social media is the platform on which we project our brand to the world.

  Annika, sophomore, private-secular university

  Even I must admit that when one creates an online profile attached to their real-world identity, they create a brand for themselves. This brand, just like Kellogg’s or Ford or Nike or whomever you please, there is an image to uphold and if it gets stained, you better have some strong bleach.

  Nancy, first-year, Catholic college

  CHERESE: A NONSTOP “PUBLIC APPEARANCE”

  The moment Cherese walks into the interview room, the atmosphere changes. She’s a woman in a hurry, with things to do. She has promised to be here, so she’ll fulfill her commitment, but she’s not going to stay any longer than necessary. Short and round-faced, Cherese attends a small Christian college in the Midwest. I try, as usual, to start our conversation with small talk, but Cherese is having none of it. She’s all business, so off we go, a bit awkwardly, Cherese’s deep voice filling the room with abrupt answers. I quickly learn that she’s a junior from Chicago and a serious debater. She’s also very involved in the missionary Baptist church her grandfather founded. Her aunt is the pastor and her father the associate pastor.