American Girls Read Free

are in fact the number one users of social media.
    In 2015, 88 percent of American teens ages thirteen to seventeen had access to a mobile phone, and 73 percent had smartphones, according to the Pew Research Center. Ninety-two percent were going online from a mobile device daily, and 24 percent were online “almost constantly.” Girls ages thirteen to seventeen are slightly more likely than boys to have access to a smartphone, computer, or tablet; and “teenage girls use social media sites and platforms—particularly visually-oriented ones—for sharing more than their male counterparts do,” according to Pew. The numbers of girls on social media on a daily basis run high regardless of race, education, and household income, or whether they are living in urban, rural, or suburban areas. In 2015, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and online pinboards such as Pinterest were the most popular sites for girls. Girls in 2015 were exchanging anywhere from 30 to more than 100 texts per day, according to studies.
    Just why girls are on social media “all the time,” and what they’re doing there, are the subjects of my investigation; but that they’re on it an inordinate amount of the time is important to note before beginning to explore these questions. Are girls addicted to social media? If you ask them, many will say they are. The words “addicted” and “addiction,” “obsessed” and “obsessing,” came up again and again in my interviews with more than 200 teenage girls as they talked about their use of their smartphones and consuming media and using social media. How else can you characterize an activity that, depending on which study you reference, occupies from nine to eleven hours of your day?
    Among researchers, the jury’s still out on whether social media addiction is truly an addiction in the way of dependence on drugs and other substances, although it’s becoming increasingly well established that social media use lights up the reward centers in our brains, causing our hormones to dance. Girls talk about the “dopamine jolt” some researchers say their brains experience when they get “likes” on their posts and photos; and if they don’t know of the studies, they know the feeling of pleasure associated with seeing their pictures reap online rewards; they also know the feeling of letdown they get when their posts are ignored or, worse, are ridiculed or attacked.
    It’s an extraordinary new reality, and it’s happened so fast; for the first time, most American girls are engaged in the same activity most of the time. And this seismic shift in how girls spend their time is having a profound effect on the way they think and act, as well as on how they make friends, the way they date, and their introduction to the world of sex. But what are the effects? When we talk about social media, we say we’re “going on” it, similar to the way we talk about going on a trip. We seem to experience it as a sort of mental journey to another place; but this isn’t a neutral place, it’s one created by businesspeople, and much of it emanates from Silicon Valley.
    I don’t think we can talk about the culture of social media, this place where girls are spending most of their time, without talking about the culture of Silicon Valley. In popular myth this is a place where boy geniuses create magical communication tools which bring us all closer together, tools which prove so irresistible to masses of people across the globe that the boy geniuses earn millions and billions of dollars—money with which they then invest in the ideas and futures of other boy geniuses. The popular myth isn’t very far from reality. According to the Department of Labor, 70 percent of the workforce at the top ten Silicon Valley firms in 2012 was male and 63 percent was white. Of the executives and top managers at those companies, 83 percent were male and white.
    A 2015 study by LinkedIn found that “software engineering teams in