By Sophie Stowe, American University
In eighth grade, I was finally allowed to have an Instagram account, which at the time was extremely important to a girl’s social life. Freshman year, I downloaded Snapchat, a platform that allows you to send an image with text and also allows users to post “stories” that all followers can see for twenty-four hours. Late sophomore year, I began to realize that I didn’t like how much time I was spending on these apps and what I was posting. While I used to post images of nature, I found myself only posting pictures with friends because those pictures got more likes and comments. I stopped going outside as much to spend time on the apps and generally felt insecure about myself. I deleted Snapchat and Instagram, then re-downloaded a month later to see how it felt. I realized how much I compared myself physically to other girls and how much I felt like an outsider when I saw people hanging out on “stories,” even though I had plenty of friends.
Adolescent girls all over the world experience the same noticeable feelings of loneliness, and social anxiety known as the “Fear of Missing Out” or FoMO. At this time, our brains develop very quickly, and our experiences either solidify or reconstruct our beliefs about ourselves and the world around us. Social Media Services (SMS) are one of the main ways that adolescents inform their identities today. The messages that are sent by social media can cause feelings of anxiety, depression, or FoMO, but can also inform our subconscious beliefs and perceptions of the world, including what it means to live a fulfilled life. Social Media Services display images that hypersexualize or objectify women and show stereotypical career identities, which can affect adolescent females’ self-concept, social adeptness, and self-worth. These externalities of social media use can negatively impact cognitive development and career identity development.
Statistics show that SMS use is higher than ever and used at younger ages on various new platforms. From 1999 to 2012, the United States saw a 44% increase in children’s overall media consumption and use (1). In 2011, 58% of 12 year-olds owned smartphones, but a 2019 study, found that 53% of 11 year-olds and 69% of twelve-year-olds have phones (Pinon). The percentage of time spent social media multitasking per day also increased from 16% in 1999 to 29% in 2009 (1). Media multitasking is the use of more than one source of media at a time, and chronic media multitasking is associated with lower cognitive and focusing abilities. 73% of 8-18-year-olds use social networking sites, and “24% of U.S. teens report being online “almost constantly”(Barry)(1).
The most popular SM platforms include Facebook, Youtube, Instagram, Snapchat, and TikTok (I will not include messaging apps like Facebook Messenger or Whatsapp because they do not portray images that reinforce societal norms). Because these apps are “social,” people can interact and communicate reactions to visual content through comments, likes, republishes, or direct messages, all of which create a reward or validation system. It is essential to understand the system of reward that is created by these interactions because they train the brain to assess what is “good” and what is “bad.” Very quickly, users understand what types of photos will get likes or views and will begin to model their content after those influences. Many apps implement behind-the-scenes “reward schedules” to program maximum engagement in their users by targeting cognitive reward pathways (Haynes).
Facebook is the original SM platform and the one with which I am least familiar. It is most commonly used by millennial women. It’s relative, Instagram is what most people in my generation and younger teens are growing up with now. On average, 63% of Americans use Instagram daily, 56.3% of Instagram users are female, and 72% are teenagers (Aslam). It is one of the most significant cultural influences today, and due to its largely young consumer population, it is a platform on which many products and trends are advertised and made popular.
One way that trends and ideals are portrayed on Instagram, TikTok, and Youtube is “influencer” accounts. An influencer is someone who has a large following. There are more than 500,000 of them on Instagram, and 81% of influencers have between 15,000 and 100,000 followers (Droesch). Due to their large following, brands ask influencers to sponsor them and use their following to market the brand. 55.4% of influencers have sponsorships (Aslam). Because of this reward, for many young women, becoming an influencer is a goal, but to be an influencer you need to become a ‘product’ that people will ‘buy.’ Photos with faces or people in them get 38% more likes, and #Beautiful is the fifth most popular hashtag on Instagram (Aslam). On Youtube, men tend to watch sport or video game videos, while, as of 2016, 62% of all Youtube videos watched by millennial women were beauty and style videos, followed by health and fitness with just 6% (Female Millennials). Though young women may not know these statistics, the message of ‘physical appearance matters the most’ is understood loud and clear. While influencers have interests in many areas such as sports, music, travel, food, female influencers are most often recognized for being attractive. Due to influencers’ perceived social success and fulfillment, young girls idolize them and begin to form an understanding that being young, petite, and attractive, communicating that this is the ‘ideal,’ will bring you sponsorship, popularity, and social validation.
It is clear that SMS use is rising, and the content that girls are seeking and accessing is largely gendered, looks-based, and performative. One of the most recent influential sites for teens is TikTok. This app, created in 2016 in China, merged with a similar American app Musical.ly and successfully gained all American users making it the eighth most-used social app in the world as of January (Iqbal). It has 1.5 billion downloads and allows users to make minute-long videos and like Instagram contain content ranging across all interests. The average daily time spent on Tik Tok is between 45 and 52 minutes, and 63.4% of American TikTok users (Androids) are women, and 26.8% of those women are teenage girls (Iqbal). Adolescent and teen users are watching thousands of short videos a day with unpoliced content. The app was banned in India in 2019 due to concern about its content, which could be inappropriate and “predatory” (Iqbal). The app became legal again once it installed more parental regulation options and censorship measures, however, many inappropriate videos are seen by thousands of young eyes before being taken down.
My sister, an active 17-year-old TikTok user, reports that videos of young teens in revealing clothing performing sexually suggestive dances are very popular. She also describes being conscious of what it takes to become famous on TikTok. She listed two general account types and approaches to becoming popular; “you either have to do something unique (be funny, go cool places, or do a rare sensationalized activity) or be pretty (do makeup, perform suggestive dances, make cute trendy videos)” (Stowe). Another app she described was “Insights+,” an “Instagram account analysis app” that synthesizes data from your profile. It reports activity such as follower gains and losses, most and least liked photos, who does not follow you back, and general trends over time. She uses the app mostly to see who unfollows her and reflects that her habits of checking it may be “unhealthy.” Another Instagram feature allows the account owner to see activity such as how many times a post was viewed, shared, or saved by followers and from where people accessed the content. These features and apps show that her least liked photo “is a photo of [her] on a horse in [her] very happiest place,” whereas her most-liked photo is a photo that I took of her at the beach during golden hour. Another photo of her playing polo professionally “one of [her] proudest moments, only got 320 likes…but this photo (a photoshoot in a crop-top and ripped jeans “looking [her] best”) got 420 likes” (Stowe). It is critical to think about the explicit and implicit messages that are being sent by “rewarding” young women.
“Our profiles are enormous identity claims. The same way that our office spaces, bedrooms, and style choices can communicate our status, interests, and relationships, so do the images that are important enough to be posted on a media page.”
All teen girls who have a media account come to realize that their social media is a means of identity expression. Our profiles are enormous identity claims. The same way that our office spaces, bedrooms, and style choices can communicate our status, interests, and relationships, so do the images that are important enough to be posted on a media page (Ouellette). In eighth grade, I distinctly remember wanting to post a picture of me surfing at the beach because I wanted to be known as a “surfer girl.” I understood that what I posted said something about me, and I knew how I wanted to be perceived. A year or so later, I began to feel that my full self wasn’t accepted on social media, which I understood because photos of me got more likes than photos of what I liked to do; at the time what I liked to do was my primary source of identity. I stopped posting the things I cared about because I wanted to be popular, and subconsciously, what I looked like became my identity. Media’s effects on adolescent and teenage females vary between personality types, demographics, and geographic location. However, on average, there is a positive correlation between high social media use and decreased mental health.
About 25% of teens self-report that social media use impacts them negatively, taking away from friendships, and promoting bullying (Gupta). In a study, 8-12-year-old girls who practiced media multitasking felt less social success, feelings of abnormality, and sleep loss, which is correlated with social media use as well (1). Another study showed a positive correlation between the number of times a student checked their social media accounts with higher levels of FoMO, loneliness, inattention, and depressive or anxiety symptoms (Barry). I have identified four main categories of female development that social media affects. These include social adeptness (i.e., intimacy, habit, and relationship development), mental health (i.e., anxiety, depression), self-esteem (i.e., self-sexualization, self-worth), and finally, self-concept or career identity development.
Social media platforms are designed to elevate young adolescents’ social experiences through ‘hyper-connectedness’; however, they can end up doing the opposite, and their use can be correlated with “unhealthy social experiences”(1). With many everyday developmental activities happening online, such as gossiping, providing support, and sharing information, drawbacks such as separation of the actual self from the ideal self arise (Pluretti). The ideal self is a representation of what a person hopes to be or is ideally in their minds, for which social media is a perfect delivery platform. Selective self-representation allows someone to only show the attributes in themselves that they find valuable or attractive; this can lead to perpetuating ideas about the ‘ideal’ or the ‘norm,’ which can influence the way that friends see each other (Pluretti). Andrea Reubenstein conducted a study that found that girls who believe that their friends are participating in sexual or illegal activities (drinking and drugs) are more likely to join them. This study makes it evident that social media use negatively impacts adolescent girls’ perceptions of their and others’ social interactions.
Misconceptions about the true nature of social interactions can lead to FoMO, which can affect SMS users in two ways. First, a user may see that people she knows are hanging out without her. Social media has the ability to complicate the matter, create misunderstanding, and, therefore, unnecessary anxiety. The second type is the anxiety that comes with detachment from media. It is a stress that we all feel when we do not know where our phone is, and we cannot check Facebook or Instagram. Social media-induced anxiety is distinguishable from normal adolescent social worries because FoMO follows adolescents home. Before social media, kids could go home and use their free time to develop their interests and identities in the context of their families. Now, children come home, remove themselves from their families, and enter a virtual social space that does not represent reality and poorly influences mental health, even impacting sleep schedules. A study shows that the number of social media accounts a female adolescent has is positively correlated with their anxiety and FoMO levels, indicating that if an adolescent has more media accounts and spends more time online, their anxiety levels will rise as well (Barry).
SMS’ influence self-esteem through the feedback that an adolescent receives on social media platforms. In the same way that likes and other forms of validation can reinforce identity development, it can also positively or negatively reinforce self-worth. Positive comments on a post are correlated with higher self-esteem, which can lead to higher satisfaction in life. Along with these positive externalities of social media use, Andrea Reubenstein also highlights risks such as a lack of self-esteem, which can result from cyberbullying or ‘selfie culture’ (Reubenstein). Selfies play an interesting role in psychological development; frequent posting of selfies has been linked to narcissism and can also cause viewers to lack self-esteem (Reubenstein). Body image is also affected by social media use. Girls who spend more time on social media are more likely to prize a thin ideal, which can lead to a lack of self-esteem during a time when the body is going through many physical changes. Girls aged 13-15 who have not created a strong identity, may be led to use their bodies as a way to create an identity and relate to other people (Reubenstein).
Exposure to social media’s sexual content is also correlated with increased sexuality at younger ages (Reubenstein). Self-sexualization occurs when a person’s sense of self-worth comes from their physical attributes and sexuality; this can come at the expense of other attributes seeming valuable to personhood. Self-sexualization, self-objectification, equating self-worth with appearance, and dysfunctional appearance perceptions can be the results of social media access. The mechanism that starts these behaviors is witnessing how attractive people on social media are rewarded for being beautiful (Trekels). From Trekels et al.’s study, they found that adolescents are particularly vulnerable to internalizing body image ideals found on social media and self-sexualization. For their study, the researchers looked at four countries and asked boys and girls questions about their daily routines. This includes how much time they spend consuming media, as well as what types of sexualizing behaviors they practice (grooming hair and makeup or working out). Their findings supported their hypothesis that “media exposure relates to adolescents’ self-sexualization,” and that time spent using media can result in an increased personal investment in adolescents’ sexual appearance and development (Trekels). Negative body image and self-sexualization can influence women throughout their lives, impacting hobby choices, relationships with significant others, and career choices.
What happens to girl’s career-identity development when the most “successful women” visible to young girls on the internet are hyper-sexualized? During my interview with my sister, an active Instagram user, I asked, “Who comes to mind when thinking about successful businesswomen on Instagram?” She could only come up with two names: “Kylie Jenner and Kim Kardashian,” she claimed that that is what most girls her age would say (Stowe). Most people in the United States know who both of these women are. However, while most agree that they are successful, many do not attribute their success to their business acumen. Instead, the associations with reality TV, Kim’s released sex tape, and Kylie’s lip filler scandal come to mind. Above all, these two women are known mostly for their bodies. It must be noted that their businesses are part of the cosmetics and beauty sectors, thereby perpetuating for young girls, the message that their skillsets are limited to specific sectors. The Kardashians are sexualized icons, and they are what most girls think of when they visualize a popular, successful businesswoman.
During adolescence, girls are trying to figure out who they will be, what success looks like for them, and what they need to do to become successful. When looking at popular images of successful men and women, the young Instagram user will see men playing sports and video games and women applying makeup or trying on clothes. The Kardashians have built an empire around their and other’s physical appearance and fill spots five and six on the list of most-followed Instagram accounts in the world. The messaging found on their accounts and thousands of other virtual spaces dictate what girls see themselves capable of achieving.
‘You can’t be what you can’t see’ is a phrase many feminists and social scientists have heard before, and the field of STEM perfectly reflects this phenomenon. Female representation in STEM fields, while on the rise, remains well below 25% (Steinke). However, it matters which type of degree is in question; to contrast, women are awarded 73% of psychology degrees, while only receiving 16% of all engineering degrees (Lee). Many studies point to girls’ preparedness and cognitive ability to succeed in the sciences. All of the data shows that our conceptions about women and STEM careers are purely socialized. Teenage girls gather information from both informal (parents, friends) and formal (teachers, counselors) sources to inform their career identities. Social media and general media (television, advertisements) are now the main informers of their identity development. Media perpetuates girls’ exclusion from the STEM fields (Malik). Girls face many barriers when trying to form a STEM identity, such as parental discouragement, lack of mentors, reluctance to join such a male-dominated field, and social penalization for demonstrating leadership potential in a STEM area (Malik). Media can frame and reinforce social perceptions of gender stereotypes, including career paths, sexuality, and gender roles. It can “reflect.., shap[e], and reinforc[e]” identities and beliefs (Steinke). The career identity development that adolescent girls need in order to thrive in STEM-related or business-focused fields is not supported by the powerful influences of social media.
With mindfulness, parental involvement, and a sound support system, most adolescents will develop into healthy young adults and maintain a relationship with SMS for the rest of their lives. However, growing access, changing content, and pervasive messaging is making it harder for kids to chart their way through the already complicated time of adolescence. Solidifying a stable identity is key to establishing a healthy relationship with one’s body, peers, and the self. Technology is the future of connectivity and communication. How do parents, teachers, and mentors make sure that adolescents are benefitting from their online experiences? How do we reframe what our girls’ futures will look like and provide them with imagery that encourages them to pursue their dreams free from limitation?