Odd Girl Out

by Rachel Simmons

  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.38

  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.39 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 t
he 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.

  The ubiquity of texting has inflected the dynamics of real-time friendship. Many girls think it is rude when a text is not instantly answered. It is now considered normal (if not outrageously rude) to text other people while you are spending time with a friend. The arrangement satisfies the texter's hunger to connect and offers her the impression of being in two—or seven—places at once. But the quality of such companionship is poor. As Amy, thirteen, told me, "My friends are always texting or calling their boyfriends or other friends whenever they're at my house. I feel like I'm losing my friend and her attention. It makes me feel so left out." Still, Amy remained silent. She did not feel entitled to speak up.

  Each moment of insecurity, jealousy, anxiety, or anger online can ignite into something much bigger. All it takes is a quick, sarcastic text from Judith to start drama with her two friends at the mall. If Meghan decides to post a snarky message about her lying friend, it's a shot fired across the bow. Just a few years ago, these unique challenges and questions did not exist. But when a girl is sitting in front of a computer or phone, without the reassuring eye contact or comfort a present friend can provide, her feelings of paranoia, fear, anxiety, and insecurity may skyrocket.

  Yet to ascribe the challenges girls face in BFF 2.0 to the medium alone would be a mistake. Social media may magnify emotions and facilitate cruelty, but it does not "make" girls act a particular way. For it is not just technology that is altering girls' friendships; girls influence the ways technology is used. They import and impose their distinctly girl values and habits online.

  In ingenious ways, girls manipulate technology to reproduce the girl dynamics of real life. In person, one girl might make another one jealous by walking down the hall arm-in-arm with a new friend or love interest. Online, girls re-create this effect by posting vengeful, intimate photos. When Facebook ended the practice of allowing users to rank their "top" or best friends, girls compensated by using another Facebook mechanism to designate their closest friends as family members and even spouses. Just as boys whose parents ban war toys are known to cut a piece of toast into the shape of a gun, girls have made Facebook bow to their need for social hierarchy.

  The unique communication rituals and habits of girls have also found homes online. In the hallway, an irritated girl mutters a clipped "hey" to signal something is wrong. On her phone, Lindsey texts her sullen "hi" with only the lowercase letter "h." "That would mean I'm angry," she explains. When all is well, "I'm [typing] 'hi what's up?'" And consider Erin, who takes the silent treatment into the twenty-first century by refusing to respond to a text when she is upset with someone. "When you have the option of not sending a message back, you have a sense of power. That is your way of saying, 'I'm in control of this relationship.'"

  If the phrase "just kidding" wasn't bad enough in real life, it becomes even more cutting and confusing in BFF 2.0. Consider these messages: "HEY GET A NEW PROFILE PIC WOMAN LOL

  LUV YA," "shut up Amber ©," "rosa, you're such a b——ch. Just kidding, you're not a b——ch. You're great." Are these senders really kidding? If you were a girl who received them, what would you think? Where real-time jokes can be sussed out for tone or gesture, these comments stand alone on a screen. They may be read by an insecure girl, a girl who bears a grudge against the joker, a confident girl, a distracted girl. Everyone has a different trigger point, and the opportunity for misinterpretation, and retaliation, is rampant.

  Leah Martin, twelve, attends a public middle school in a middle-class suburb of a major East Coast city. During our telephone interview, she speaks so fast I can hardly follow her. My in box pings and pings; seated in front of her computer, she forwards links, chat conversations, and e-mails she thinks I'll want for my research, all without breaking stride in any sentence. She spins dizzyingly from one story to the next, and I scramble to keep up as she guides me through her social universe.

  Most striking about Leah's life is a social hierarchy mediated by technology. Leah has a friend, Carrie, who she has met and now interacts with entirely via text message. Despite their frequent contact, when they pass each other in the hallways at school, they do not say hello.

  They don't speak? At all? "It would have been awkward if I said hi to her," she explained, while I listened, agog. Leah had other friends who she only texted but still greeted, though "in person if we hung out it would be so awkward it's beyond belief. In person it's so awkward, I don't even want to talk to them." Then there was Andrew, a friend who told her he loved her in text messages but could not say it in person.

 
Leah volunteered to explain what she called her "food chain" of friendships:

  My friends at the bottom of the food chain, like, I text them all the time but I don't socialize with them in person. Another level of friends is, you can be friends with somebody on Facebook but never have met them. I have over eight hundred friends on Facebook. I haven't met some of them. I don't know them. I don't talk to them. Then, my friends that I text and who are acquaintances. We say, like, "hi." Then I have good friends-ish: we text all the time and we hang out in person. And then we have, like, our best friends. You don't text them. You call them all the time. You talk in person and you can be completely honest with them. You text them but you talk on the phone and hang out every weekend. They are, like, your life.

  If the girl mandate is to be constantly connected and have lots of friends, social media allows Leah to "overachieve." She can show off her success to her peers and reassure herself that she is far from alone.

  Leah can also experiment with new, if slightly cringeworthy versions of relationship. On the one hand, her text-only friendships seem to substitute technology for authentic connection. On the other hand, who are we to judge? As long as she is safe and satisfied, why shouldn't Leah enjoy the thrilling reach of social media? Most tellingly, despite these new permutations of relationship, some things don't change: best friends are best when they are live and in person. The 2010 study by the Girl Scouts confirmed that 92 percent of girls would give up all of their social media friends if it meant keeping their best friend.40 Your closest friends, as Leah says, "are, like, your life."

  The fluidity between girls' online and virtual worlds allows them to recruit the tools of social media to execute offline agendas. Consider this Instant Messenger conversation41 between Trisha and Leah. Trisha begins by instant messaging Leah, ostensibly to tell Leah that she has a new invitation to trick-or-treat on Halloween. It quickly becomes clear that Trisha has another agenda: she is in conflict with Julie, their mutual friend.