The Happiness Effect

by Donna Freitas

  I push Grace a bit, on whether she thinks this ability to discard identities is a good or a bad thing. She doesn’t think “there’s a judgment call for that,” so it’s neither good nor bad—it just part of the deal. “It’s not something that we can really change, and it’s not something that people are willing to give up,” Grace tells me. “This freedom of being able to be whoever you want to be, and in this case, be multiple people … . personally, I think that’s a little bit dishonest, but there’s nothing stopping you from doing that.”

  I ask Grace if people who “discard an identity” and create a new one can do it in a positive way. She shakes her head again and sighs. “You could, but most people don’t do that,” she says. “Most people only do it because, the only reason you would need two identities is if you’re not satisfied with the first. So, if you’re a really positive identity, it’s very unlikely that you would try to create another one doing more positive. You would just build upon the one that you have. Whereas if you’ve built a very negative identity that’s received negative criticism, then it’s easy to say, post on that account, ‘I’m going to shut down. I’m leaving,’ and then you can turn off your account and no one will bother you ever again, while you pull up another window and make another account and just keep going. It’s convenient for people who don’t like what they’ve been doing.”

  Grace clearly doesn’t like this situation, but freedom, both good and bad, comes only with anonymity. And despite the drawbacks, Grace’s anonymous online life is hugely positive for her self-esteem. She enjoys it, thrives on it, feels liberated by it, and finds much-needed community through it. Given the demand for positivity online, the professionalization of social media, and the branding of the self, students need to seek out other ways to be themselves online. Anonymity allows them to do that.

  LET YOU BE YOU

  Grace is by no means the only student who spoke at length of the joys of anonymity. Susan, an English major, told me how much she loves Tumblr, where she uses a fake name. On Tumblr, Susan says, “I can speak out more and mention things that I’m really interested in that, for example, maybe if I said out loud in public, people would think I’m strange.” When I ask Susan to give me an example, she mentions not some deep, dark secret but her unbridled enthusiasm for Disney princess movies. Susan doesn’t want people making fun of her for this, and Tumblr is a safe place for her to post about it.

  “It’s not that I portray myself [on Tumblr] as a different person or anything,” Susan says. “For example, my Facebook, it has my name on it. Everyone on there knows me, so my thoughts would be similar to what I would say, in a normal public atmosphere, but my Tumblr or any other account my friends don’t know about, I’m more open on there.” Susan feels her Tumblr username acts like a shield that protects her and allows her to say certain things “out loud” that she would never say either in person or online in places where her real name appears.

  Then, during a visit to an evangelical Christian college in the Southeast, I meet Angela, a tall, curvy young woman with long blond hair who smiles a lot and has a sweet, soft voice. A glint appears in her eyes, as if she has a delicious secret, and soon I find out Angela does have a secret—well, she used to—a secret Twitter account. She made it when she was feeling down and abandoned by her friends. And, boy, did she love it.

  “I do have a Twitter account that’s anonymous,” she tells me with a laugh. “I made it—this is going to sound stupid—I made it to get followers, because I thought it’d be fun. I was bored, it was after some [bad] stuff happened in freshman year in college, I only had a couple of friends.” Angela had been paying attention to people on Twitter for a while, seeing how the site works (“what gets the most retweets, what gets the most ‘favorites’ ”), and she thought to herself, “I could do the same thing.” So, she tried it. “It started out as an experiment, and then, speaking my mind if I was frustrated with my friends,” she says. “I would vent on that account, and no one would know it was me. I think that’s why I did it.” Angela started the account when she was feeling alone and rejected by her friends, so posting to it and gaining followers gave her a sense of social connection that helped counter some of the disconnection she was experiencing in her real life. The anonymity of it added a layer of safety and a feeling of protection for Angela.

  Angela hasn’t posted to the account in about six months, but when she was on it, she especially liked the freedom that anonymity granted her to speak her mind. During this experiment she learned that posts with hashtags get the most retweets and “favorites.” And it was very important that the tweets not be personal. “If you were actually using it as a personal account, people didn’t care,” Angela says. “It was the superficial, it was almost like a celebrity account, if that makes sense. So it was, like, putting something out there that people want to read. They did not want to know the person behind the account, if that makes sense.” This, for Angela, added yet another layer of safety—not only were her posts anonymous, but Angela wasn’t posting on things that were dear to her, so even if people ignored her tweets or said something nasty, she could better shrug off the response (or the lack of one).

  Eventually, Angela amassed thousands of followers.

  How did she do it? “You just start interacting with different people, different groups,” she tells me. Actually, Angela and Susan have something in common. “I really like Disney, so one of the things of mine, like, my background was a Cinderella theme, so you get in with some of the other Disney people, they all retweet you. It’s the retweets, that’s how you would get follows.” Angela says she “made it to vent,” but eventually she got to a point where she was just “playing with it” to see how it all worked. Getting “favorites,” retweets, and new followers got Angela really excited. “You would feel successful, I guess,” she says. “It’s like getting points in a game.”

  Interestingly, unlike Grace and Susan, Angela says she posted many of the same things on the accounts attached to her name as she did on her anonymous Twitter account. “The only thing that would different would be if I was really angry, I could put some cuss words in my anonymous one,” Angela explains. By posting more or less the same things to all her accounts, Angela learned something interesting. “People are more willing to interact with you if they don’t know the person behind it,” she says. “It gives you anonymity, but it gives them anonymity too… . I think it’s less intimidating [than Facebook]. Whereas, if it’s your name on there, [people] might not necessarily be as willing to retweet things. So, my name on that [Twitter] account was not a person’s name.” Occasionally, Angela would get more of a response to a post on Facebook, but it really depended on the subject. On Facebook, people respond more to personal things.

  Angela rarely uses social media at all anymore, except for saying “Happy birthday” to people and keeping in touch with family. The Twitter account was a fun experiment, though, and she enjoyed it while it lasted. Only a few friends and Angela’s boyfriend knew about it. Well, and Angela’s younger brother. It’s here in our conversation that Angela shows just how detached she has become from it all. Angela’s brother had his own Twitter account, and when he found out his sister had so many followers on Twitter, he asked her “to give him a shout-out” to help get him more followers.

  Instead, she just gave her account away. As she tells it, “I said, ‘You can just take this one.’ ”

  THE JOYS OF THE “DISAPPEARING POST”

  While it’s true that just about everybody seems to be on Facebook, that doesn’t mean that it is the students’ favorite platform. It’s more like a necessary evil. Because everyone is on Facebook, even professors, it’s useful for staying in contact with people and communicating about class projects. And, of course, Facebook functions as a social media résumé. But it is no longer as much fun for students as when they first got their accounts. Even Instagram, which is infinitely more appealing to students than Facebook, can be stressful because it’s generally attach
ed to your name.

  Snapchat is a very different story. College students love Snapchat.

  They love it because their “snaps,” or posts, disappear within seconds. You take a photo, give it a caption, and send it off as a visual text to a friend or group of friends. Yes, your profile is (usually) associated with your name and your real identity, and everyone knows that people can take screen shots of your “snaps,” but as long as you’re not reckless with what you send and who you send it to, you can feel pretty safe that it’s really going to go away just as the app promises.

  Students express nearly universal adoration of Snapchat. As people explained why they love this app so much, it became clear that college students are longing for a space where they can be themselves and not have to worry that it will come back to haunt them in the future, when potential employers start looking at their online activity. They can rest easy knowing that their Snapchat photos, selfies, and comments will fade away.

  The very fact that snaps disappear has led Snapchat to become known as the “sexting app.”2 And, yes, people use it for that. But for the college students I spoke with, this is an impoverished and limited understanding of Snapchat’s true delights.

  College students can be silly on Snapchat. They can be ridiculous. They can say dumb things. They can take goofy, ugly, unbecoming photographs and show them to other people. They can be sad, they can be negative, they can be angry, they can even be mean. They can be as emotional as they really feel. They can be honest. And it’s true, on Snapchat college students feel they can be sexy. But most of all, they play on Snapchat and they engage in all kinds of foolishness. And that’s why they love it.

  On Snapchat college students feel they can do all the things they’ve learned they’re not allowed to do on Facebook or any other platform that is more “permanent” and attached to their names.

  Matthew tried to explain the difference between Facebook and Snapchat to me, and why Snapchat is much more fun. Like many students, Matthew goes onto Facebook a lot, but not to post—posting is too time-consuming and too much work, because every post has become so high-stakes. Mostly, Matthew just scrolls through the feed and lurks, checking out other people’s updates and photos. But Matthew loves Snapchat and goes on it all the time, and unlike with Facebook, on Matthew actually participates.

  “When I’m bored,” Matthew says, “I’ll snap a picture of something random, send it to, like, five people and wait for somebody to respond. [Snapchat] is really simple and fast, and it’s a way I can see what all my friends are up to, especially all my friends back home, all over the state and stuff. They’ll send me back a snap of them like, I don’t know, doing whatever, and I’ll be like, ‘Oh cool.’ It’s almost like I’m there, so it’s a way to share experiences from far away, and it’s so quick and simple.”

  Snapchat offers its users a way to connect without judgment, a possibility that college students, who feel they are constantly being watched and evaluated, long for. That’s what Facebook is supposed to be, too, in theory, and perhaps it was at some point. But for Matthew, Facebook is almost exclusively a place to wish someone happy birthday, to celebrate engagements and marriages or comment on family matters. The other thing Facebook is for is announcing “something huge” that happens in Matthew’s life—so he can cultivate his highlight reel. “Graduations or, you know, success in baseball,” Matthew says, and pauses as he searches for another example of what might prompt him to post something on Facebook. “So, say I threw a no-hitter, I would probably take a picture of the scoreboard with all the zeroes across it, and I’d post it on Facebook like, ‘My first no-hitter in college.’ ”

  But then Matthew tells me he’d “snap it” to people as well, the people, in this case, being his friends—his real friends, not his pretend Facebook “friends.” He might “snap” his baseball no-hitter, or he might “snap” a picture of himself nearly asleep in class and write along with the photo, “Crazy bored right now” and send it to “everybody, so hopefully they’ll send something back and help entertain me,” he adds with a laugh. “There’s no effort in Snapchat. I just look at something, hold up my phone, and hit a button, then I send it to everybody… . Snapchat has [My] Story for 24 hours, so for 24 hours, you can snap a bunch of stuff, put it on [My] Story, and at any time people can look and see what you’ve been doing the last day or so.”

  That lack of effort Matthew mentions is another part of Snapchat’s appeal—especially when “crafting” just the right post these days sometimes takes forever. People have to worry about so many things when getting ready to say something online: will people “like” it, will they ignore it, will it turn out to be a comment later regretted, will it offend anyone, will it worry anyone, will it show me in a positive and happy light, will it display my successes, will it make me seem enviable—this list could go on and on. It’s very difficult to find a student who makes regular updates on Facebook today because deciding what to post and wording and editing it takes so long and then you have to contend with all the stress that follows the posting. Updating social media—the kind that sticks around—can be exhausting and feel like a job.

  With Snapchat you can just relax and play around. Another thing that’s nice about Snapchat is that it’s one of the only platforms where you don’t have to worry about cultivating an image, Matthew tells me. You can snap pictures when you’re drinking alcohol, or simply not show your “perfect” side. This is a huge relief for him, and another reason he loves it so much. He explains, “My image on Facebook and Twitter is a lot better than it is to my friends on Snapchat.”

  By “better,” Matthew means more airbrushed and less himself. Snapchat brings Matthew so much joy because he can just be who he is, however he is at the moment, even if it’s not happy or particularly becoming. It’s a platform for being “real.”

  So many students I interviewed told me more or less the same things as Matthew did about Snapchat. After hearing one student after another talk about the importance of always appearing happy and positive, and the concern about possible repercussions if they do not, it became clear that there was a connection between the pressures of Facebook and its waning popularity among students. There seems to be a direct correlation between the professionalization of Facebook and the “branding” of one’s name on certain social media platforms and the rise in popularity of apps like Snapchat and Yik Yak. That Snapchat promises a kind of “no repercussions” experience is absolutely beguiling to everyone who feels burdened by the pressure to appear perfect everywhere else.

  Snapchat, I think, provides a kind of catharsis. It’s the place where everyone lets off steam and celebrates imperfection. Of course, the speed with app rises and fall in popularity today is so meteoric, by the time this book comes out Snapchat may have already faded into oblivion. But I have no doubt that the “professionalization” of social media is only going to get more intense as young adults learn to toe the line at even earlier ages. As a result, young adults will keep looking for places that allow them to be silly, to be ridiculous, and to have a little fun on social media, whether it’s Snapchat or some other app that allows disappearing posts or anonymity. Only by ditching their real names, it seems, can young people truly be themselves online.

  Of course, as indicated earlier by both Grace and Emma, there can be a dark side to anonymity, too.

  YIK YAK: A TOTAL TRAIN WRECK

  That dark side is called Yik Yak. I first heard about it from a sophomore at a northeastern Catholic university.

  “Have you heard of Yik Yak?” she asked me.

  When I answered no, she explained, “I don’t know if it’s new, but I recently discovered it.” She continued, “People can post anonymously about anything, and whoever is within your area can see it. So going on and seeing what’s going on here … .people will post like, ‘Yeah, who’s down to come over and have sex or whatever?’ and ‘Who’s down to party? Who’s down to smoke?’ I feel like if that’s what’s presented online, I’m not
at all wanting to be a part of that.”

  Yik Yak hit college campuses like a lightning bolt. When I started doing interviews for this project, not a single student mentioned Yik Yak because it didn’t yet exist. It popped up over the summer before students went back to school, and it became ubiquitous everywhere I went, seemingly overnight. Suddenly, everyone wanted to tell me about Yik Yak.

  Yik Yak is often described as an “anonymous Twitter,” and each campus has its own Yik Yak (more or less). Yik Yak functions like another infamous app (Tinder) by using the GPS on your phone to locate you. To log on to a certain college’s Yik Yak, you must be on or near campus. It also functions a bit like Reddit, in that people “upvote” and “downvote” whatever gets posted, causing the most popular posts to stay at the top of the feed where everyone can see them, while the least popular ones drop so far down they basically fall into oblivion.

  Yik Yak’s arrival has sparked a media frenzy, with splashy articles in USA Today, Slate, and the New York Times and stories on CNN.3 It has quickly become associated with scandal and hate speech as well, as in the case of the students at the University of Missouri who posted racist and violent threats and were identified through their IP addresses and charged by local police, confirming for all that Yik Yak remains anonymous only if its users stay within certain boundaries.4 What those boundaries are, exactly, and whether they include racist, sexist, and other hate speech is still evolving.

  But the best way to understand its presence, its use, and its effect on campus life and culture is to hear students themselves talk about Yik Yak. Many of the women and men I spoke with claimed to be voyeurs on Yik Yak—it’s a train wreck, and they can’t tear themselves away. But I did meet a few people who admitted to not just lurking on Yik Yak but participating, too.