The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  On the most sinister level, this sounds a lot like the interpretation of Bentham’s panopticon in Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, but on a virtual scale. College students (and young adults in general) are highly aware that because of social media, they can be “spied upon” at any and all moments by people they’ve never met, can’t see, and who may hail from far-flung locations, all of whom may have power over their lives. To draw on Foucault, this makes participants on social media “inmates” of a virtual sort, because no one knows “whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so.”4 Young adults know (by way of the adults in their lives who’ve warned them) that this is effectively the deal they’ve signed up for on social media—by attaching their names to various platforms and by commenting and posting in these public spaces, they are allowing themselves to be surveilled and policed on a constant basis and must behave accordingly or suffer the punishment of not getting a job after college, or not even getting in to college. In this same vein, Daniel Trottier has written extensively on the relationship between social media and surveillance, and devotes consideral energy to investigating how university administrators have come to regard surveilling their students’ social media activity (especially on Facebook) as a new and important addition to their professional responsibilities—important both for the personal safety and future prospects of their students, but also to the well-being and reputation of the institution they represent.5

  But the notion that we are using social media to police, spy upon, and subsequently judge our children, students, and future employees (however well-intentioned we might be in doing so) is rather chilling. In It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, danah boyd alludes to a generational conflict around the idea of privacy, and that even posts that teens make in public forums like Facebook deserve to remain private from certain constituencies (namely parents), much like the diaries of old that teens kept to record their most secret thoughts and feelings. The widely accepted notion that all young adults today overshare and therefore don’t care about privacy is wrong according to boyd, and she argues passionately that we’ve misunderstood teens’ relationship to privacy—they do desire it, intensely so, and believe that it is inappropriate for “parents, teachers, and other immediate authority figures” to surveill them on social media.6

  But the college students I interviewed seem to have given up on the idea of retaining any semblance of privacy on social media forums attached to their names. They’ve accepted the notion that nothing they post is sacred and everything is fair game for evaluation by anyone with even the littlest bit of power over them—that these are simply the cards their generation has been dealt.

  Hence, the Facebook Cleanup that so many of the students talked about at length, has sprung up in response to the situation that young adults find themselves in today. A Facebook Cleanup involves going back through one’s timeline and deleting any posts that do the following:

  •Show negative emotion (from back when you didn’t know any better)

  •Are mean or picked fights

  •Express opinions about politics and/or religion

  •Include potentially inappropriate photos (bikini pictures, ugly or embarrassing photos, pictures showing drinking or drugs)

  •Make you seem silly or even boring

  •Reveal that you are irrelevant and unpopular because they have zero “likes”

  Students who aren’t quite sure what to keep or delete can consult numerous news articles for advice.7 The term “Facebook Cleanup” is apt, since students’ fears are very much focused on Facebook rather than other social media sites. Facebook is so ubiquitous among people of all ages, that students consider it the go-to app for employers. As a result, it’s the social network where they feel they need to be most careful, and where they believe the creation of what they refer to as the “highlight reel” is most essential. For college students, the highlight reel is a social media résumé, usually posted to Facebook, which chronicles a person’s best moments, and only the best moments: the graduation pictures, sports victories, college acceptances, the news about the coveted, prestigious internship you just got. Students often organize their Facebook timelines to showcase only these achievements and use other platforms for their real socializing.

  In The App Generation, Howard Gardner and Katie Davis briefly remark on the notion of a “polished,” “shined-up,” “glammed-up” profile, “the packaged self that will meet the approval of college admissions officers and prospective employers.”8 Students are indeed seeking control of public perception in a sphere where loss of control is so common and so punishing. Gardner and Davis worry that young adults’ belief that they can “package” the self leads to a subsequent belief that they can “map out” everything, to the point where they suffer from the “delusion” that “if they make careful practical plans, they will face no future challenges or obstacles to success.”9 This makes everyone disproportionately outcome-focused and overly pragmatic, especially in terms of careers, and less likely to be dreamers.

  The students I interviewed and surveyed certainly are outcome-focused in their online behavior when it comes to pleasing future employers. But rather than giving the students a false sense of control, which Gardner and Davis find so worrisome, this focus seems instead to make them feel incredibly insecure.

  And who can blame them?

  They are acutely aware of the precariousness of their reputations and the potential that their lives could be ruined in an instant. The students I spoke to clearly understand that they lack control because of the way they’re constantly being monitored online. This knowledge was central to nearly every conversation I had.

  Students consider a couple of topics particularly treacherous. One is politics, a subject on which they believe they can easily and quickly lose control if they aren’t careful.10

  One young man’s social media filter is so well-developed that he tells me he would never post anything provocative, for fear of the possible repercussions. “I’m not one of those people that just goes and posts their social opinion on the gun policy or gays being able to get married and then starting a whole bunch of arguments on social media where anyone can see it,” he says. Photos that include alcohol are also off limits, even if you are over twenty-one. He’s made sure that anyone who goes to his Facebook page sees that he is outgoing, popular, and active in various campus groups, and that he “seems like a respectable person.” He’s learned to use his Facebook account more like an online résumé—the highlight reel I hear about constantly from students—for the benefit of future employers. He finds it hard to believe that some people haven’t learned this lesson yet. “I hate when people post their political or social ideas,” he tells me. “Once it’s out there it’s always out there. You don’t want a future employer being able to see that and then them just getting an instant, maybe negative image of you, because they have a different view. So, I just try to stay away from that. I just try and stay neutral in everything on social media.”

  Even George, a conservative gun enthusiast who attends an evangelical Christian college, worries about the fine line he is walking between connecting with like-minded peers and potentially offending future employers. George primarily sees social media as a vehicle to connect with other gun enthusiasts and advocates of Second Amendment rights. “I’ve always been into firearms—I have since I was a kid,” he tells me. “I’ll post a lot of Second Amendment stuff. I’ll post a few Republican posts here and there for certain politicians if I know them or if I’m a big advocate.” He feels somewhat “safe” in posting about the Second Amendment because all of the people he’s connected to online are also gun enthusiasts.

  However, when we discuss the problem of future employers reviewing people’s social media profiles, George echoes his fellow students. “You don’t want to put on there you being held upside down by your ankles for a keg stand,” he says. “And don’t put stupid stuff on there.”
George knows that his political views can get him into trouble if he’s not careful—the gun-related posts especially. “I don’t put anything that’s super left- or right-wing,” he tells me. “Stick to fairly moderate, big issues, because you don’t want to offend people. If you get an employer that is a Republican or is a Democrat, and their views conflict with yours, even though they shouldn’t care, they’re going to be biased. Everybody’s biased and everybody’s selfish. That’s a basic economic principle. Everybody is self-interested. If they got two guys there, you’re exactly the same, and your employer’s a Democrat and you’ve got one [candidate] that’s a Republican and one that’s a Democrat, then the Democrat stands a better chance of getting [the job] because [the employer] is self-interested. It’s not necessarily that [the employer] is trying to be biased, it’s in his state to go with somebody that’s more like-minded.”

  Appearing happy and positive in order to please potential employers was also of central concern to students. In the online survey, students were asked to reply yes or no to the following statement:

  I worry about how negative posts might look to future employers.

  Seventy-eight percent of the respondents answered yes. And, when asked about the dos and don’ts of social media, 30 percent said that the main advice they’ve received about social media was related to employment.11

  Most students feel that they are in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation. They worry about whether future employers might find an offending photo or post attached to their names. But many of them also worry about what happens if they have no social media presence at all for their future employers to scrutinize and dissect. If they are completely absent from social media, this might seem suspicious, too—a future employer might assume the worst about them (i.e., their photos and posts are so vulgar and unbecoming that they’ve hidden everything from the public). As a result, many students keep their Facebook pages updated with the highlight reel—a G-rated social media résumé that employers are welcome to peruse. As long as employers can find something, and that something is good, students believe they’ve done their social media homework.

  THE GOOD OL’ DAYS

  There was, among the students I met, one exception to the rules about Facebook Cleanups and what future employers will likely forgive. The kinds of roll-your-eyes embarrassing, unbecoming, ridiculous things a person puts up during middle school—when the thrill of getting your first social media account is overwhelming—are often given a pass. Even Aamir, fervent advocate of the “spotless record,” feels this way (mostly). Many students believe these sorts of comments and goofy pictures (even the occasional mean post) can stay because they were just kids when they posted them, too young to know any better. What’s more, some students are nostalgic about those posts and like to go back and laugh at their younger, sillier, more uninhibited selves.

  Avery, a senior, regards those early posts with affection. “I like looking back to what I used to post, old photos I’m tagged in and stuff,” she says. “I think that’s kind of fun… . I think that a lot of kids my age will go look [back]. Sometimes a really old post that they made will resurface… . like a picture that we think is funny now, but they thought was serious at the time, and some really deep quote or something like that, which they’re embarrassed by now.”

  But once you hit high school, all of that has to change. As you get older, you learn how not to post like that anymore.

  “Starting in ninth grade, I did a big Facebook Cleanup before I went to college,” Avery says. “I just figured I needed to get rid of the embarrassing pictures, the embarrassing selfies from ninth grade and stuff like that.” Earlier than ninth grade, though, can stay.

  In fact, many students view the shift in their habits in a way that calls to mind the Garden of Eden. There was a time of innocence, when they would post whatever they wanted, and then they learn that people will use their online activity against them, and they begin to feel shame. They see the transition from one state to the other as a new kind of rite of passage from childhood to adulthood. There is a fondness in their voices when they harken back to those early days, when they weren’t so aware of the need to appear perfect, pandering to future employers (or college admissions people or coaches or sorority sisters). They are remembering a time when they could simply be themselves without penalty or punishment—at least not a lasting one.

  One young man tells me he did a “complete one-eighty” with regard to what he posts and doesn’t. He talks specifically about how when he was younger his posts were more immediate and less filtered. “It’s more of a mature level that I operate now than compared to when I was young,” he says. “If I had a thought in my head, boom, to Facebook it went. To Twitter it went. If I saw something in the news that I thought looked interesting, or I thought would generate a discussion, boom, to Facebook it went.” Now that he is older, he stays away from anything that might be deemed even a little bit provocative.

  Certainly by college, those carefree days of social media are gone for good. Those who have grown up on social media are professional about it. And to be professional about it means, for most students, maintaining the facade of a happy, successful life that will impress future employers.

  THE PEOPLE BACK HOME

  The message about professionalism on social media seems (at least for now) to be focused mainly on college students. It is relentless and unchanging. One of the only meaningful distinctions I noticed was when students began to feel this pressure, when they learned to project their best selves online. College students like Aamir, who hail from wealthy families or communities where everyone is college-bound and groomed for it from a young age, may learn this lesson as early as middle school, whereas students from poorer backgrounds where going to college is not a given for everyone (or anyone) may only learn this after arriving at college.

  But once they are on campus, the message is drilled into them.

  The more prestigious the school, the earlier the students seem to have learned about Facebook Cleanups. Most colleges now offer training on how to appear upstanding online—refreshers for those who know this already, and wake-up calls for any stragglers. But students at the most academically rigorous and wealthy institutions tend to absorb this lesson in high school.

  It is on my visit to a public university in the rural Midwest that I first notice the relationship between economic background and the point at which people learn to scrub their profiles. The students at this institution come largely from either tough inner-city neighborhoods, from which few people make it to college, or from some of the most rural areas in the state, where their parents are struggling farmers or working-class laborers. Nearly every student I speak to at this university discusses how, since starting college, they’ve learned how important it is to watch what you say online because you never know who is keeping an eye on you. They know—it is always on the tips of their tongues—that one single post can cost them everything they’ve worked so hard to achieve. When you are the first person in your family to go to college, the stakes are high, and their school is reminding them of this almost daily, and not just in the Career Center but also in the classroom. The university has taken on, with gusto, the task of educating its students about how to behave appropriately online.

  One young man who attends this particular university, Mack, a sophomore who grew up on a farm and used to raise show pigs, speaks often of the difference between how he used to post before college and how he’s trying to post now. His posts tend toward the negative—he’ll post updates such as “I just had a really bad week” or “Will this end?” Mack will post when he’s “really stressed” and is atypical in that he admits to using social media as a place to vent. (I heard complaints all the time from students about exactly this type of person—the one who’s always negative—but it was rare that someone I interviewed confessed to engaging in this behavior, which led me to wonder, where are all these negative posts coming from?) Mack says he used to post
a lot back in high school but does so much less frequently now. “One of the reasons I don’t post very often is because I’m trying to keep a very professional appearance, not like a superprofessional appearance, but not anything that would discourage a future employer,” he explains, then goes on to list the things he’s learned not to post about since he’s gotten to college. “I don’t post any profanity. I won’t post how someone’s being terrible. I won’t slander anybody or call someone out on a post. I always use proper grammar… . But also, if I’m going to respond, I think about what I’m going to say before I say it.” Mack’s university is trying to teach everyone to stop putting up the “typical party post,” the photograph of underage kids who are “hammered.” This is a “professionalism” issue, they’ve told everyone. You don’t ever want to document illegal activity.

  Since coming to college, Mack has begun to see a difference between the kinds of things he and his peers on campus post, and the kinds of things people from home post—something I hear frequently on this campus. “I won’t be putting [up] just silly stuff, and sometimes I’ll post or repost something that struck me as inspirational, but I guess my image does matter to me in the professional way, just because I don’t want people to think I’m white trash,” he says. “There’s a lot of that in the posts of the people that are connected to me from home, just because that’s the kind of demographic that we’re in. There’s a lot of profanity, and drama, there’s so much drama. It’s just bad grammar, or just blatant laziness, and texting lingo, and just, it doesn’t look educated, or even a high school level of education. I try to portray more that I’m a college student and I’m intelligent enough to post well.”