American Girls (9 page)

“He'll probably send rumors,” Riley said as the girls walked to Victoria's house after leaving the Dunkin' Donuts.

“Yeah,” Sophia said, “but after Danny, what can he really say?”

“He could say a lot. He could say whatever he wants,” Riley said mournfully.

The streets of Montclair were lined with shady oaks and silverbell and dogwood trees. There was the buzzing of a lawn mower off in the distance. The girls were discussing what Zack, the boy who had asked Riley for nudes, would do if she didn't send them.

In a regular case, where there was no “situation” like Riley currently had with Danny, a boy who asked for nudes could be handled with humor, they said. It must be humor, never anger, said Sophia: “If you get mad they'll think that you have no chill. They'll be like, Oh my God, like
chill,
I was just asking. But if you say no and laugh, they'll think you have chill. They judge you if you don't send nudes, like you're a prude. But if you just laugh, then they'll be aggravated, but they won't do anything bad to you.”

Such as what? I asked.

“Start rumors. Pretend like you sent them a naked picture they got off the Internet and it's not even you,” Sophia said. “Sometimes it's girls that send nudes first. Some girls do it 'cause they're thirsty”—a disparaging word for someone who seems desperate for sexual attention—“and some girls do it 'cause they have a good body and they want to show boys.”

I asked them if they knew if any kids in their school watched porn.

“Oh, yeah,” Sophia said. “Boys talk about it in my school.”

“They watch it on their phones,” said Riley. “Danny watches Pornhub.”

At Victoria's house, a white clapboard Colonial house, the girls were joined by another friend, Melinda, age thirteen; she was a girl from their school, white, with streaked blond hair, wearing shorts, a blue button-down, and Converse. Her mother was a university professor and her father a film editor. “I am so excited to be talking about this, because we never talk about social media, we just live on it,” she said.

The girls sat around the dining room table eating their doughnuts and the brownies Victoria's mother had left for them on a plate. Victoria's mother was picking up her little sister at soccer practice. The dining room was lined with windows looking out on a deep backyard where you could see round-breasted robins hopping in the grass.

The girls filled Melinda in on Riley's difficulty outside the Dunkin' Donuts.

“I can't believe I had an anxiety attack over this,” Riley moaned. “I got afraid someone would post something about me if I went in there. That's what social media is doing. It's anxiety-causing and depressing.”

“It causes so much drama,” Sophia agreed, her mouth full of brownie. “You don't know how much drama I have over my phone.”

“With girls our age, so much drama happens over social networking,” Melinda told me. “Probably more stuff happens on my phone than in real life.”

“I feel like we're living in a second world,” Riley said. “There's a real world and a second world,” on social media.

As they started talking about all this, they became urgent and intense, just as the girls in Boca had become when they were talking about social media. They began talking fast, raising their voices, interrupting and overlapping one another.

“All we talk about all day is what's happening on our phones, but we never talk about how
weird
that is,” Sophia said.

“I spend so much time on Instagram looking at people's pictures and sometimes I'll be like, Why am I spending my time on this? And yet I keep doing it,” said Melinda.

“If I go on my phone to look at Snapchat,” Riley said, “I go on it for like an hour, like a really long time, I lose track.”

“The minute I start my homework I have to have my phone by me,” Sophia said, “to see what my friends are texting or if they're sending me texts, and then I'm automatically in a conversation. It's like someone is constantly tapping you on the shoulder, and you have to look. It's distracting.”

All of them said they were in one or more group chats of four to eight friends and that they sent or received “hundreds” of texts a day. “Oh my God, at least three hundred,” Sophia said. “I get a text, and it's like,
Oooooh,
I have to check that, like, Oh my God, what are they saying? I don't want to miss anything. I'll be like, Mom, it's really important drama, I have to solve it! But sometimes it'll be like nothing, like what kind of chips you eat.

“But I
need
my phone,” Sophia added, “I can't survive without it. I stay up all night looking at my phone.”

“Two weeks ago I really annoyed my parents by going on my phone too much, so my punishment was I had to delete my Instagram app on my phone for a week,” Melinda said. “By the end of the week I was stressing, like, What if I am losing followers?”

“I've always wanted to delete my Instagram,” Sophia said, “but then I think, I look so good in all my photos.”

She logged on to her Instagram account to show me her page: it was picture after picture of her face, all with the same mysterious, come-hither expression.

“The classic Sophia selfie, bite-tongue smile,” she said with a laugh. “It's my brand.”

All of them said they had Photoshopped their pictures and edited them with special filters and apps—especially their selfies. “I've darkened my lips and made my eyebrows on fleek,” meaning on point, Sophia said. “I never post the first selfie I take. Sometimes it takes like seventy tries.

“Every time I post a selfie,” she went on, “I need to check who's commenting—like, Oh my God, I'm getting so many comments. People are like, ‘Oh my God gorgeous,' and you feel good about yourself. I'm so happy when I get likes. We're all obsessed with how many likes we get. Everyone says, I get no likes, I get no likes, but everyone says that even if they
get
likes—it never feels like enough. I feel like I'm brainwashed into wanting likes.”

What was striking in hearing them talk about this was how conscious they were of what they were doing, their awareness of the inauthenticity of the self they presented on social media.

“It's funny it's called a ‘selfie,' ” Riley said, “because half the time it doesn't even look like you. So you're getting people to like this picture of you that isn't even real.”

The acquiring of likes has become a major theme in corporate marketing, of course; companies invest serious money in studying how to get social media users to like and tweet and post about their products. Social media users have become the most powerful of advertisers, taking word of mouth to a whole new level. For a
Frontline
segment in 2014, “Generation Like,” technology writer Douglas Rushkoff went to Montclair to talk to teenagers about their role in building brands. “When a kid likes something online,” Rushkoff said on-air, “a product or a brand or a celebrity, it becomes part of the identity that they broadcast to the world, the way a T-shirt or a bedroom poster defined me when I was a teen. For kids today, you are what you like…And guess what? Getting people to be ‘all about' something is big business.” Including the business of social media itself—the more active users are, the more data about them social media companies can collect, and the higher they are valued, as they can then sell the data to other companies. “That's why companies need kids to stay online, clicking and liking and tweeting,” Rushkoff told a group of Montclair high school students.

But the
Frontline
segment didn't touch upon why kids seek likes for themselves—or how their methods often mirror the very techniques companies use to market brands. The girls in Montclair said, for example, that they planned what time of day they posted, trying to hit prime times for getting likes—another central tenet of social media marketing. On the
Frontline
segment,
New York Times
writer Brooks Barnes talked about the “day by day, hour by hour” social media marketing strategy he witnessed in covering the marketing of
The Hunger Games
in 2012: “The goal is to create a controlled brushfire online.”

“I always find a good time to post,” Melinda said. “You don't want to post in the middle of the night when no one sees it. I was on vacation and there was a time difference, so I would literally stay up to two in the morning so I could post pictures at a certain time so more people here would like them. My mom was like, What are you doing?”

Melinda and Victoria told of how they had gone to a Katy Perry concert together and posted on Instagram almost identical pictures of Perry performing onstage, but Melinda's pictures had gotten more likes, because she had posted them at a more desirable time.

“I thought it meant people liked Melinda better,” Victoria said.

“Oh, no, it's just because of when I posted,” Melinda reassured her. “I'm obsessed with getting more likes than other people—I'm always comparing myself to see how many likes my photo got. I'll post a picture on Instagram and immediately start checking.”

The captions that went with their posts were also a source of forethought, sometimes requiring a groupthink, like a brainstorming session on
Mad Men
—how to make them sound witty and clever?

“I work so hard on my captions,” Riley said. “Everyone has that one group chat where they're like, Oh my God, help me with my captions, what should my caption be?”

The location of their photos was a crucial consideration as well. “I go to the woods to get really artsy lighting and stuff,” said Sophia.

“You'll ask the people in your group chat, Should this be my location? What should I do?” said Riley.

“You get more likes if you're someplace cool,” Melinda explained.

“It's called ‘good feed,' ” Sophia said, “if you take good photos and use filters and a VSCO Cam,” a spiffy camera and editing app, “and like, have like really good captions.”

They said the most admired style of feed among their friends was the one they called “artsy” or “aesthetic.” The “aesthetic” aesthetic evolved in the late 2000s with the 2007 advent of Tumblr and other sites devoted to the posting of one's own art, as well as aggregated images of art and fashion and photography. It's used to describe a sense that social media posting
is
art—or can be art, if it's “aesthetic” enough. (Not to be confused with, although perhaps related to, the “New Aesthetic” concept introduced by British artist and writer James Bridle in 2011 to describe the response to technology by artists working in the digital age.)

“You can, like, post a picture of your cereal,” Sophia said, “but you have to make it aesthetic.”

“Aesthetic” looks, aesthetically, like a manifestation of hipster style, as exemplified by Sofia Coppola's
The Virgin Suicides,
with a dose of
Rookie
and
Real Simple
magazines. “Aesthetic” Instagrams show pictures of filtered pastel skies, girls with expressions bathed in ennui, vintage-looking buildings in black-and-white, and minimalistic bowls of steel-cut oats.

“People say, ‘That's so my aesthetic,' ” Sophia said. “And it means literally anything that they like. Like, you could say, ‘Cheerios are so my aesthetic.' ”

By 2015 “aesthetic” so dominated online culture it was already being satirized.
“Is it aesthetic? Is it aesthetic?”
asked teenage singer Ben J. Pierce (KidPOV) in his satirical “The Aesthetic Song” on YouTube.
“Put a bagel on a blanket—is it aesthetic?”

“It's so much pressure to make your Instagram aesthetic,” Victoria said with a groan. “You can't really do anything
wrong.
And if you do, people could laugh at you, like, Oh, look at her Instagram, it's so not aesthetic—it's so
basic.
”

(“Basic” was another thing entirely—basically the opposite of “aesthetic,” referring to girls who were behind the trends, the purchasers of too-obvious brands, from Gap to Gucci.)

They talked about how there were girls who used the “aesthetic” style as a way of justifying posting sexualized photos of themselves. “They try to be like Lily-Rose Depp,” Sophia said, rolling her eyes. She was referring to the sixteen-year-old model-actress daughter of actor Johnny Depp and French singer-actress Vanessa Paradis, who had recently become a social media “It” girl. Lily-Rose's Instagram page, which had more than a million followers, was filled with shots of her beautiful face looking magnificently bored, along with artsy shots in coquettish poses—a “leg shot” on a bed strewn with rose petals. In a video on Instagram, we see her smiling seductively and lip-syncing a line from the Miley Cyrus song “Fweaky (Freaky)”:
“Everything you do just turns me on / So let's go in my room and ‘na, na…' ”

“This photo makes me suicidal she's so fucking gorgeous,” a girl commented on a picture Lily-Rose had posted of herself posing on a runway for Chanel with a horde of paparazzi snapping her.

In an interview in Germany's
Gala
magazine, Johnny Depp reportedly expressed concern for his daughter. “To be honest, I'm quite worried,” Depp reportedly said. “What's happening with Lily-Rose right now isn't what I expected. Definitely not at this age. But these are her passions and she's having fun.”

“Girls will post, like, pictures of their butt and say, ‘It's art,' ” said Melinda, giggling. “But really it's just their butt.”

“Right now it's considered cool for older girls to dress up in, like, baby-doll dresses with knee socks and do a caption like, ‘Babysit Me,'
‘Virgin,' 
” said Sophia, sounding disgusted.