Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives

A Digital Coming of Age

Jill Walsh

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN: 9781134831906
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Aspects in Computer Science
• Index: Social Sciences

Adolescents are forging a new path to self-development, taking advantage of the technology at their fingertips to produce desired results.

In Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives, Walsh specifically explores how social media impacts teenagers' personal development. Indeed, through unique empirical data, Walsh presents an aspect of teen media use that is not often documented in the press—the seemingly deep and meaningful process of evaluating the self visually in an attempt to reconcile their presentation with their internal "self-story." Nevertheless, as Walsh outlines, this is not a process without its challenges.

Tracking teenagers' progress towards self-validation from the offline stages preceding online exhibitions, this enlightening volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers interested in fields such as Social Media Studies, Sociology of Adolescence, Identity Formation, Developmental Psychology, and Society and Technology.

1 Creating the visual narrative

“It’s their highlight reel that they’re showing you”

A prom picture of a well-dressed couple posing together. A picture of an unsmiling girl in a bikini on the beach, staring into the camera. A photo of a boy playing sports, his face obscured by his equipment. A smiling close-up picture of a teen on a trip. A selfie of a girl sitting on her boyfriend’s lap. A close-up of a girl making a goofy face on the train. These were some of the profile pictures I examined over the course of my social media observations. These images were important, because they made a social media first impression. And naturally, we want our first impressions to reflect our best selves. As one twelfth-grade boy described it, “I always think of it as like someone else’s like, it’s their highlight reel [of their life], that they’re showing you.”

On any app or site that relies on visual communication the architecture will dictate the different components that make up the “highlights reel,” but most sites rely on a “profile picture” or first picture that comes to represent the first impression. The key thing is that all of these sites or apps have some type of introduction (first picture, caption, biography, etc.) that forms our first impression to the audiences. On Facebook, a teen’s “highlights reel” is made up of three components: profile and cover photos, related but less significant timeline images and photo albums, and the numbers game (i.e., the number of friends you have and the number of likes you receive for your images). The teens I interviewed told me they devote the most time and care to their profile and cover photos. Timeline pictures serve to “back up” the first impression, thus assuring that sought-after authenticity. The images and metrics that other teens can see instantly essentially come to signify a teen’s social media front stage. Just as our offline front stage is our best performance, which we accomplish via the management of the impressions we give and give off (Goffman 1959), the same is true of our social media front stage as well. And again, this work has multiple audiences and participants: the social media friends who can generate likes and other content, and who also assess the content; and the poster, who assesses the responses he or she receives.

In this chapter, I present some of the images and excerpts from my interviews to show how the “highlights reel” self that teens construct on social media invokes Goffman’s (1959) concept of impression management. The teens I interviewed said that their focus is on creating the performance that will highlight the “best” parts of their personal fable. Again, no image can tell the full story, but the key point of the front stage presentation is to make sure that what gets seen first are the images that the teen believes to represent some of his or her greatest moments. The idea that the images teens select are a “highlights reel” of their stories is compelling and links well to Goffman’s notion of the front stage performance. Importantly, this does not feel like inauthentic work, nor is it perceived as generic; Goffman’s concept acknowledges both the specificity and generalizability of the performance.

Later in the book, I argue that this surface self-presentation is meaningful, but the image typologies presented in this chapter may not always appear to be meaningful to the reader. Particularly if the reader is over the age of 25! Or rather, the images are meaningful to us, but mainly because they seem to emphasize our worst fears about teenage life or the most cliché aspects of adolescence—the social meanness, the focus on appearance, risk taking, and overt sexuality. This was certainly my position when I began this project. These images seemed so trite and banal that initially I could not understand the draw to post them on social media. And so similar! Why do they all need to recreate the same images over and over again on social media? It is this surface self-presentation, full of bikini pictures, jock pictures, and party pictures, that garners the most attention in the popular press. But these images are important, surprisingly so, even if, at first glance, they do not seem all that positive. Later in the book, I will focus on the effects of these images and teens’ motivations for posting them, but for now, I want to show the typical “highlights reel” images, as most of them said that the work to create and curate the first impression takes a great deal of their time and effort. As a reminder, these images represent new content the teen chooses to create, and as such, these are the images that are produced “alone in my room in my pajamas,” giving these teens time to think through their image selection. And, too, these are the images that they most want their audiences to see; we need to understand what they want to convey if we hope to understand what meanings they make and take from their presentation work on social media.

The online personal fable

Profile pictures are the cornerstone images of teens’ highlights reels. They all told me that their Facebook profile picture was the most important picture and was the one for which they expected to receive the most likes. Indeed, all the girls told me that it is just an expectation that “all your friends will like your profile picture.” These important images are certainly an opportunity to show one’s best self; however, interestingly, they very rarely operate outside of the boundaries of the personal fable—although, as mentioned in the introduction, in some images it is harder to see or infer the fable than in others. Teens have to balance their highlights reel with their fable. For most of the teens in the study, this is not as hard as it may sound. For a few notable outliers who will be discussed later, this can be a very difficult balance to strike.

The highlights reel of the fable can be either very obvious or more subtle. It can be as direct as a boy who thinks of himself as a good athlete using a sports image as his profile picture, or a girl who thinks of herself as a good friend choosing an image that shows her with a good friend. Images can also be more subtle. A boy might highlight his nonconformity, for example, by posting unflattering images. (I want to point out here that these examples may appear to be reductive of gender stereotypes, but as I illustrate in Chapter 3, these teens are vigilant about upholding traditional norms around masculinity and femininity. Thus while my examples may seem to verge on the cliché, they are what I observed in the data.) When images can really speak to an important part of a teen’s fable, particularly qualities that might be harder to articulate than athleticism or social prowess, participants spoke about their images in ways that indicated that they represent more than simply a flattering surface picture of them. Gebre, an 18-year-old male participant, posted a picture of himself that shows him anxiously waiting to hear whether or not he was accepted to an elite university (see Figure 1.1).

Although the image was taken while he was waiting to hear from the school, he waited until after he learned of his acceptance to post it. The image received 117 likes, which for the boys in this study was an incredibly high number (to put this in perspective, the average for males during the observation period was about five likes). Gebre captioned this picture: “Yesterday … Waiting to hear back from [elite school] … Its not like I was nervous or anything.” This self-reflective caption shows that Gebre is willing to share his emotions and vulnerabilities, indicating that he was nervous and clearly appeared very stressed. But the image also serves to highlight his success. It is especially telling that he waited to post the image until after he was accepted; perhaps it is easier to be vulnerable after the outcome is guaranteed. In talking to Gebre, though, it was clear that this obvious “highlight reel” moment showcasing his college acceptance revealed more to his peers about him than just his success. His discussion of the image is illustrative of the power of the highlights reel and the personal fable coming together. When I asked Gebre to tell me about this picture, he said:

Figure 1.1 Gebre Waiting to Hear About College Admissions

I had a status before I posted that, that was talking about like, ’cause I wasn’t born here, I was born in Ethiopia … And like it’s something that’s like very rare for somebody to be able to go and do that [getting into an elite college]. And like my socioeconomic class is like one of the lowest in like the school. And so like it’s difficult for a person like me to get into a school like this … And I posted this picture because it represented like the feeling. Yeah ’cause pictures speak a lot of words.

In this brief excerpt from our dialogue, Gebre highlights some important aspects of his fable, notably the obstacles he has faced to earn admission to this school: he is an immigrant and is, compared to his peers at school, of a lower socioeconomic class. During the interview, Gebre referred often to the notion of achievement in the face of challenge. Focusing solely on the image’s highlights reel interpretation would lead us to see this as a picture signaling, “I got into a great school.” While it does do this, Gebre made it clear that the image also tells the “I got into a great school in spite of many obstacles” component of his fable. And perhaps most pointedly, it clarifies that he’s faced many obstacles his classmates have not. As he said, “Pictures speak a lot of words,” and for him this image represented the feeling of his inner narrative and is therefore meaningful for him.

Supporting the notions of adolescent development and the personal fable, this narrative highlights Gebre’s uniqueness (Elkind 1967). What is interesting about the image is that while the highlights reel function is obvious to all, its connection to his fable is not immediately clear to the broader audience. While the image and caption suggest that he is nervous about being accepted, one would have to know him fairly well to understand the link to his fable about how hard he’s worked, as a child of immigrants who did not grow up with money, to get here. As he states, “It takes a lot of work and I worked really hard for it.” This introduces another nuance of the highlights reel: the links to the personal fable and its significance need only be understood by the poster. What matters in this case is that Gebre feels this connection, even if it is not readily understood by his peers.

Thinking of teens’ Facebook profiles in this way challenges the popularly held notion that adolescents post social media content with very little thought for what it may mean or the consequences. Though I did come across photos that were posted with very little forethought, most of these were reported to be posted under the influence of alcohol and none were selected as profile pictures. And, as I will argue in the following chapter, while the initial posting may have been rash, the choice to keep these pictures, which can easily be removed or untagged, is a highly thought-out and strategic choice to signal certain behaviors, friendships, or even aspects of the emerging self.

When we engage in the front stage performance, we do not present all sides of ourselves. Just as a physical photo album contains only our best pictures—our most flattering images and images of our best experiences—so, too, social media collects the images that, as a twelfth-grade boy said, “document us being awesome.” They may be awesome moments, but they reflect an ideal reality. The key point is that they feel authentic. One twelfth-grade girl referred to her Facebook profile as an accurate portrayal of herself with “maybe more flattering pictures.” While they have different definitions of what makes them awesome, teens select images with the goal of presenting the best versions of themselves.

It may go without saying, then, that part of impression management and face-saving (Goffman 1955, 1959) means teens avoid calling attention to their fears and failures. This was certainly true of the images I observed in the study.

In a few cases, some of the boys would share an academic challenge, but it was reframed as a joke.¹ One boy, for instance, posted a picture showing his low grade on a chemistry test and crowned himself “Jeff Silver Chem God” in a status update, which was well received by his male peers. (Based on the social media gender norms I observed that allow for high levels of male idiocy among participants, it is not clear that this low grade would constitute a failure for him; or rather, an academic failure may be acceptable socially.)

While they work hard to acquire certain images, some participants reported that they are just as strategic about what they choose to leave off social media as they are about what to post. Adolescents do not post every photo they take, even if it may seem that way given the sheer quantity of their images on social media, nor do they present every facet of their personal fable on Facebook. One ninth-grade girl said,

Cause I’m, I’m kind of a nerd, um, I, I try to post like achievements. Um, but, I mean there’s also like, oh I don’t want to post this because I don’t want to be like, “Look at me. I got like this [award] …” Like I got an award in Spanish but I didn’t post it because I didn’t want people to be, like, “Oh god it’s her again.”

Although she acknowledges that her fable is that she is “kind of a nerd,” she does not want this presentation to dominate her social media images, or at least not too often. While she expresses an initial desire to post the image, she makes the decision to hold back, suggesting controlled and thoughtful impression management work.

Emphasis on appearance and the front stage

As indicated by the previous example, the first impression management work teens have to do on Facebook is to decide what to post (Kramer and Winter 2008). When I asked them about the impression they were trying to create with their images on Facebook, all teens had a clear answer and rationale for the images they selected. Image choices are rarely arbitrary or unimportant. Tom, an articulate twelfth-grade boy with an interest in politics, said that he often thinks of the image he presents on social media because

I’m always worried like, I’ve always liked politics. And I’ve always been worried about what they’re gonna say about our Facebooks and Twitters later … so I guess I’m always kind of worried about like the image I give off. That’s why I tend not to use Facebook liberally; um, I usually interact with other people’s things instead of posting my own.

The fear about how his image may be interpreted in the future has led Tom to play a more passive role on Facebook, responding to others’ pictures and comments rather than posting a large amount of his own original content.

Others negotiate their impression management “highlights reel” on Facebook by actively engaging in the creation and development of social media content. In particular, they pay close attention to ensuring they have images that signal their appearance and social belonging, both of which can be managed, within reason, through image selection. While everyone wants to look good on social media, for my participants what constitutes flattering imagery on social media is gendered. Although gender will be discussed more fully in Chapter 3, it is important to note here, as the gendered norms around what constitutes a “flattering” image are an integral component of the cultivation of the highlights reel. Girls will organize photo shoots to craft images and ensure that they look pretty, or improve images using photo-editing apps. Because it is socially acceptable for girls to care about appearance, they can invest a bit more time in their labor to produce flattering images. Every participant in the study, including the boys, could articulate the point of the photo shoot, and while some of the girls were a bit embarrassed to talk about their own photo shoot images, they did feel that it was normal for girls to have a photo shoot image as a profile picture.

Boys, who uniformly reported that it is not masculine behavior to take or pose for pictures, s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: “’cause pictures speak a lot of words”
• 1 Creating the visual narrative: “it’s their highlight reel that they’re showing you”
• 2 Facebook rules and boundary demarcation
• 3 The gendered self-narrative
• 4 The synthesis of the real and the reel me
• Conclusion: launching the evolving self
• Index