‘Endless series of contradictions’: Girls open up about complicated relationships with social media

Kate Phelps thinks the way society talks about how young girls use the internet is too simplistic. 

A big part of that, she says, is because culture spends a lot of time scrutinizing pre-teen girls, but we rarely talk to them about their experiences. Phelps, a University of Wisconsin-Madison women and gender studies researcher, wanted to change that.

Her new book, “Digital Girlhoods,” is based on her conversations with 26 different girls between the ages of 10 and 13 — an age group often referred to as “tweens” — about their feelings about social media. 

“What I found was that girls really wanted to talk about it,” Phelps told WPR’s “Wisconsin Today.” 

“They wanted the opportunity to share about this thing…that they were growing up with, and that was shaping their lives in really profound ways,” she added.

The following has been edited for brevity and clarity. 

Rob Ferrett: I think sometimes in the popular press and culture, we think of kids just sort of blundering into this online world thoughtlessly. But they really do think a lot about what they share online, don’t they?

Kate Phelps: They do. They are strategic, savvy social media users. I was so privileged to get the opportunity to speak with many of them.

And it’s not a massive study. I talked to 26 tween girls. They care so much about privacy, but they’re also balancing that with this call to be visible and wanting to represent themselves.

RF: You look at two conflicting pressures: the idea of innocent girls that need protection, versus a societal pressure to embrace a kind of girl power — to say, “Hey, you need to craft your identity. You need to show the world who you are.” Those are not the same things. They are mutually contradictory. How did girls talk about that?

KP:  They embodied that dilemma, often in the very same breath. They have been conditioned to fear this specter of the strange man online, this predator that looms.

What’s so striking about that is that we’re putting so much responsibility on a 12-year-old and saying that this person needs to to pull themselves offline, or that we need to protect them from being online because of who might be watching them.

I think this needs to be a totally reframed conversation about how we have situated girls throughout history, in media and popular culture with these very competing demands that we put on them. It’s really hard to be a girl. It’s very confusing.  

RF: You found that a lot of what girls are doing with social media is interacting with the same people that they might see at school or in their neighborhood.

KP: They are primarily communicating with friends, with people that they may have gone to school with that have since moved and they want to stay in contact with. They don’t want to miss out on anything.

This is how young people are communicating with each other, and so much of what they’re doing is within smaller circles of friends, with people they know. They’re having fun with their friends. 

RF: I’ve probably done more stories on the bad stuff ,about kids online. And it’s out there, and you acknowledge that in the book. But again, a lot of the girls you talk to about what a positive experience — or at least partially positive experience — it is as a way to build community, to build relationships with their friends.

KP: That’s the thing that makes me so nervous about some of what’s going on in the world right now. I mean, Australia has passed this bill that will ban young people under the age of 16 from social media over the course of the next year, and other countries are paying attention to that. 

Policy-wise, do not mistake me — I think we need very clear, open dialogue and discussion with our young people about what social media means to them, how they use it, why they use it. I also think there are so many important opportunities and possibilities that come with being able to self-represent. 

That’s something that’s so striking to me. We worry about girls in public space. We worry about who might be looking at them. We worry about things like body image comparison and negative body image. But this did not come to us from social media. Social media is an infant. We don’t know what its net negative or positive impacts are going to be, and that’s something I want to pay attention to in the long term. 

Girls have fun online. They create videos, they are coders, they are dancers, they are comedians. They’re doing incredible content creation, and they get to be a part of it. I think we forget girls helped make social media what it is.

So I think it’s damaging and indeed dangerous, this idea of policing their behavior to such a degree that we’re going to pull them offline. Because what we’re saying is, then, by virtue of their gender identity, by virtue of their age, they are automatically high-risk. And if that’s the case, then we need to be having a very different conversation.  

RF: I’m going to do a little reading from your book here: “Popular culture and mass media tell girls to be confident, but not too confident. Be vulnerable, but do not show too much of yourself online. Be authentic, but only in appropriately self-effacing ways. Be pretty, but not vain. Be thin, but not too thin, but certainly not fat. Be smart, but not too smart. Be active, but do not bypass the boys. Be a leader, but in a suitably feminine way. Be sexy, but not slutty.”

If I took the word “online” out there, I bet that would sound very familiar to women of a number of generations before social media ever came around. 

KP: Absolutely. This is not new. This is something that is experienced across the life course for people that identify as female and feminine. 

Girls recognize this endless series of contradictions about who they’re supposed to be and how. The ability to represent themselves on these social media platforms in ways that demonstrate their interests, their depth, their value, what they find meaningful — I think there’s a lot to pay attention to. If we’re interested in who girls are and what they’re doing, they’re telling us. We just have to value it enough to look at it.