Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration

US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles

Aimee Rickman

• Publisher: Lexington Books
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781978783744
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens' Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles considers teens' social media use as a lens through which to more clearly see American adolescence, girlhood, and marginality in the twenty-first century. Detailing a year-long ethnography following a racially, ethnically, and economically diverse group of female, rural, teenaged adolescents living in the Midwest region of the United States, this book investigates how young women creatively call upon social media in everyday attempts to address, mediate, and negotiate the struggles they face in their offline lives as minors, females, and ethnic and racial minorities. In tracing girls' appreciation and use of social media to roots anchored well outside of the individual, this book finds American girls' relationships with social media to be far more culturally nuanced than adults typically imagine. There are material reasons for US teens' social media use explained by how we do girlhood, adolescence, family, class, race, and technology. And, as this book argues, an unpacking of these areas is essential to understanding adolescent girls' social media use.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• 1 “I Guess I Can Be Myself There, Instead”
• 2 “It Just Felt Like There Was a Lot More Space Around Here Before”
• 3 “This Is About as Good as It Gets”
• 4 “I Don’t Want Them Knowing My Business. And They Don’t Have To”
• 5 “I Think It’s Pretty Private”
• 6 Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author