Nancy Jo Sales - American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers

Ever since I was a little girl, Ive read myself to sleep. Often throughout my life Ive awakened to find the light still on and a book resting in my hand after Ive dozed off reading a few more pages. When I was ten and twelve it was The Chronicles of Narnia, To Kill a Mockingbird, and Jane Eyre. Ive always been crazy for the great noir writers Raymond Chandler and Patricia Highsmith and James M. Cain. Reading has always been like breathing to me, necessary for existing and thinking. But recently, I find, as I try to make it through the pages, my mind keeps wandering to my phone. Whats happening there? What am I missing?

One possible reason for my sense of distraction is that for the last two and a half years Ive been researching a book on girls and social media. I went on a sort of picaresque journey, visiting ten states (New York, New Jersey, Virginia, Florida, California, Arizona, Texas, Indiana, Delaware, and Kentucky) and talking to girls, ages thirteen to nineteen, about their lives on and off social media. After I met the girls and talked to them, I followed them on their accounts, seeing what they posted, checking on how they were doing. And even though they knew I was one of their followers on these public forums, sometimes the watching still felt, as girls call it, like stalking, and sometimes I would ask myself, What am I doing? What are we doing?

I followed apps girls said they liked, such as Yik Yak, the so-called anonymous Twitter. Yik Yak, launched in 2013 by two young men who met at Furman University in South Carolina, is popular with high school and college kids. Like many anonymous apps, it has appeared in the news in connection with cases of cyberbullying, and some school districts and colleges have banned it. But in the five-mile radius in which Im able to view posts, an area including some New York City high schools and New York University, Yik Yak users are most often heard voicing concerns which echo those of young people throughout the ages: Am I attractive? Will anyone ever love me? How can I be expected to put up with my annoying roommate?

There are a lot of Yik Yak posts about sex. And many of these seem to be describing something different from what we know of young people in the past. There are posts about wanting sex, and seeking sex, even just cybersex, immediately, it doesnt seem to matter with whom. (Anybody wanna fuck?) Technology makes such instant sexual connections possible. There are threads in which users exchange their names on other anonymous apps known as places for sexting and the sharing of nudes. Sometimes the language of such posts is reminiscent of the language of porn, riddled with disparaging words for women and girls. At first I found such posts jarring, but after a while I sort of got used to them, and they didnt seem that remarkable anymore. On social media, things which once might have been considered outrageous or disturbing come to seem normal very quickly through widespread repetition.

And then, one Saturday night in October 2015, I was on my phone, scrolling through Yik Yak and not reading a book, when I heard about something which even blas Yik Yakkers were finding shocking. Oh my God, Syracusesnap. LMFAO Syracusesnap. Whats Syracusesnap? people asked. Everybody wanted to know. Everybody had to know.

Syracusesnap was a Snapchat Story, a series of pictures or videos on Snapchat which stay viewable for twenty-four hours rather than the usual one to ten seconds per Snap. On Snapchat, famously launched in 2011 by three fraternity brothers from Stanford, Stories have become the most popular feature, with more than a billion viewed daily, according to the company. But few go viral. Within hours of its creation, Syracusesnap was being followed by college students and teenagers across the country. Notoriety for the Story circulated faster than a Gossip Girl post, said The Tab, a college news website, and the only news organization to write about this. In an era which has seen an almost total erosion of privacy, there are still things which exist only in the world of young people, hiding in plain sight, online, and Syracusesnap was one of them.

Soon it wasnt just Syracuse [University] students jumping on the bandwagon, said The Tab. Snaps from schools like Pitt, Cornell, and NYU were added to the storymeaning that other schools were following Syracusesnap and contributing pictures to it. Cuse is lit! and Wish we went to Cuse! were among some of the captions featured, said The Tab. Everyone add @Syracusesnap on Snapchat. Youre welcome, someone tweeted. What was causing the excitement?

Syracusesnap featured pictures of kids in college dorm rooms drinking and doing drugs, but what was getting it all this attention were its many images of naked girls. Girls having sex. Sex with boys, sex with girls. The sex with boys was almost always in a standing, bent-over position, the girls heads pointing toward the ground. Some of these shots were adorned with cartoon pictures of footballs and references to Syracuses annual Orange Central homecoming and reunion week. It was as if some twisted public relations expert had melded pornography and school spirit to make Syracuse look like the best party school ever. But more on that later.

There were pictures of girls breasts and girls behinds, many where the girls were lying prone on a bed or on the floor, their faces hidden. There was a picture of a boy holding two girls bodies on his shoulders, their behinds, in identical black thongs, facing the camera, his dumbstruck face encased with butt cheeks. Snap whore, said a picture of a girl Snapchatting, her cleavage prominently showing.

There had been scandalous college Snapchat Stories before; in fact, such accounts can be found at colleges across the country. Theyre a sort of rebellious parody of Snapchats Campus Stories, another feature on the app which many schools sponsor and monitor, and which typically shows students in their fun-filled and inspiring momentslooking joyful in the stands at winning football games, attending lectures.

In 2015, Arizona State Universitys SunDevil_Nation became notorious for its shots of students brandishing bags of weed and snorting cocaine. UCLAyak, named in homage to Yik Yak, had sexually explicit photos and videos cycling every few seconds, according to the Daily Bruin, the University of CaliforniaLos Angeles paper. The anonymous psychobiology student who created the account told the Bruin he wasnt surprised at the nudity: It was just a matter of time. Thats what Snapchat is for. He said he suspected that some of the videos on other rogue campus accounts were staged, created to shock. Snapchats Community Guidelines prohibit sexually explicit content, and the company routinely deletes Snapchat Stories that violate its policies, but as soon as theyre banned, they often just reappear with a different handle.