When the blue strobe light flashed, Noah dove into the pool with as much force as he could muster. He raced down the lane. At the wall, he flipped hard, shoving through the water, kicking as forcefully as he knew how. A quick peripheral glance revealed that he was ahead of Jiang by about a body length. Noah’s angle was too sharp for him to see the other swimmers. He remembered a lesson he had learned as a sophomore: “Breathe less, don’t think.” He decided to take two breaths instead of three. Don’t let up, he told himself. Pretend this is the last swim of your life. Coaches had told Noah’s team repeatedly, “If you leave everything in the pool, you can have no regrets.” Now he clung to that.
Noah took his second breath and shot forward through the last fifteen yards. He slammed into the wall and looked up at the scoreboard. Lane 5: 23.51. First place. Noah leapt with joy and fist-pumped. He shook hands with Jiang, who placed second but hadn’t qualified. Noah had done it. He was a district swimmer.
NOAH’S CHALLENGE
Noah’s challenge was not easy to devise. He wanted to get to know more people at school, to improve his self-worth, and to convince classmates to view him as a leader. I told him that, similar to his swimming pep talk, for people to see him as a leader he had to act like one. When I explained that I was issuing each person a challenge, Noah was willing but nervous. “Redsen is pretty cliquish, and some of those cliques just don’t cooperate,” he said. Even the elected student government officers hardly acted like leaders. The class officers hadn’t held a meeting in months. It was no wonder, he said, that Redsen seniors were no longer allowed to go off campus for lunch, go on a cool class trip, or leave school early when they were finished with classes. Nobody was lobbying for the privileges.
I thought about how Frederick picked on Noah, football players physically shoved him, and other classmates made fun of him. Noah wasn’t their only target. I asked Noah to think about a way to rally as many other disenfranchised students as possible toward one cause.
In our next conversation, Noah asked if he could use his recycling program to unite students across clique boundaries. I thought that was a great idea. If Noah could get enough marginalized students to work together, they might see him as a leader, and they could prove that non-popular kids could do as much as or more than the populars for the school; plus, if the program were successful, perhaps the administration would agree that Noah’s class was responsible enough to deserve senior privileges. Most important, acting like a leader could boost Noah’s crumbled social self-esteem. If Noah felt like a leader, maybe it wouldn’t matter so much that he couldn’t get elected to student government.
WHITNEY, NEW YORK | THE POPULAR BITCH
In the car on the way to a restaurant, Bianca, Giselle, and Madison—all size zero—complained that they could never find the perfect pair of jeans. “All three of us are thin, so we all share the same problem!” Madison exclaimed. I’m right here, Whitney thought. Whitney was a size six.
Whitney believed she should be grateful that the preps still allowed her to hang out with them, despite her recent return to her hippie wardrobe and her continued relationship with Luke. “No one wants to be friends with a [former] prep,” Whitney explained. “That’s why when there isn’t room for me in the party car, I have no choice but to stay home. I have no other friends.”
Whitney had observed firsthand what happened to girls whom her clique turned against. The twins moved away because the populars had ensured that they couldn’t make any friends at school. Now the clique targeted Irene. Without a popular boyfriend, she had no real connection to the group. Desperate, she wore anklets like Bianca’s and concocted stories about her past to try to sound cool. She constantly told Bianca how pretty and funny she was and how the two of them were so alike that they could finish each other’s sentences. She dug up juicy gossip to whisper into Bianca’s ear, and continued to steal her mother’s alcohol for the preps.
Her efforts didn’t save her. First the preps stopped including her in plans. Then they filled up the seats at their cafeteria table so that she was stuck on the end, and they turned their backs to her until she moved. When Irene still followed Bianca around, Bianca finally banished her from the group for good. Bianca and Giselle were sitting on a bench in school one day when Irene joined them and complimented Bianca. “You know, Irene, you really are fucking annoying,” Bianca said. Irene walked away. Now Irene could count only one friend at school: a punk girl who was nice to everyone.
After dinner, the prep girls went to the mall. They planned to browse for a few minutes in Spencer’s Gifts just before closing. A Goth-looking girl behind the counter groused, “You guys seriously have four minutes.” The populars left the store within three.
Whitney was the last one to leave. As she walked out, she heard the Goth say to her coworker, “I hate girls like that. They think just because they’re tan and skinny, they can do what they want. They come in here when they know the mall is closing, and they don’t care about anyone but themselves.”
That hadn’t been Whitney’s intention. But the Goth girl’s impression was a stereotype that Whitney had to deal with often. In Spanish class that week, the students had to write about things that annoyed them. Most people chose to write about obvious peeves, such as liars or people who chewed with open mouths.
As Whitney wrote her essay about “selfish and fake people,” Caroline, an emo girl in the corner, raised her hand and asked, “How do you say preps in Spanish?”
GRADUALLY WHITNEY BECAME AWARE that the populars were leaving her out of activities. Bianca sent public Facebook Valentine’s Day gifts to Giselle, Madison, Kendra, and Chelsea, but did nothing for Whitney. Through Facebook, Whitney learned they went to the movies, the diner, or parties without her. Whitney was aghast to find herself making up rumors so that she could “talk trash about people, especially Chelsea, to make it seem like I’m providing gossip. That part sucks about being in this clique. You have to lie a lot, especially about your own happiness. Everything is fake when you’re in a clique.”
Kendra had a party to which she didn’t send Whitney the Facebook invitation she sent everyone else. Whitney was hurt less by the omission than by the fact that her so-called friends didn’t object to it. “True friends would have talked to Kendra and been like, ‘Hey, can Whitney come?’ ” Whitney said later. “But since my friends only care about themselves, they were just happy they got an invitation.” To ease the pain of exclusion, she spent even more time with Luke.
The morning after Kendra’s party, Giselle’s father called Whitney’s house looking for his daughter. Giselle had told him that she was staying at Whitney’s. Whitney was furious that Giselle had used her house as a cover for an all-night party that Whitney wasn’t even invited to. She Facebook-messaged Giselle that she was a terrible, worthless person. When Giselle called Whitney’s house, crying hysterically, Whitney’s mother picked up the phone. Giselle told her what had happened.
After they hung up, Whitney’s mother came into her room. “Whitney, you need to stop being so mean if you’re going to make any friends in college,” she said. “You need to be nice to people or you’re going to end up very lonely. Wish for your happiness, not the unhappiness of others.” Whitney stared at her blankly, even though she knew her mother was right.
WHITNEY’S CHALLENGE
Whitney was certain that without the preps, she would have no one. I wasn’t so sure. She was gregarious and energetic, and I thought perhaps she could use her interpersonal skills for good. She wanted to be open-minded and meet new people, but as a prep she felt constrained from doing so.
When I told Whitney that I wanted her to participate in an experiment, she was immediately game. I asked her to attempt to de-clique herself and become a floater, breaking out of the prep group to mingle with various other—and, according to the preps, lesser—groups of students. Furthermore, I said that she could not be mean to any students for the rest of the school year.
Whitney was eager to get start
ed. I got the sense that she was the most enthusiastic of the characters to embark on a challenge because it gave her a legitimate excuse to escape the grip of populars who mistreated her and others. Whitney was most excited to get to know the punks.
______
FACEBOOK AND MYSPACE: ONLINE CAFETERIAS
“One thing that really emphasized how unpopular I am was when I was on Facebook,” an Indiana senior told me. “I had just gotten a new account and there were some people I was hesitant to friend. I decided to send friend requests in case I ever needed to contact them for a project. More than one deleted the post saying they had friended me. It was a slap in the face. I know I’m not popular, but am I that socially devastating to be associated with?”
According to the 2010 Pew Internet & American Life Project national report, 73 percent of online teens and 82 percent of wired fourteen-to-seventeen-year-olds use social networking sites, a quickly rising population that increased by nearly 20 percent in three years. Between PTA panic and headlines in the popular press, sites such as Facebook and MySpace have drawn ire for sending unwary kids straight into the cyberclutches of predators. But studies of social network sites (SNS) reveal that most kids aren’t going online to meet strangers. They are spending time on these sites in order to connect with the people they already know. According to Pew, more than 90 percent of teens who visit SNS say they use them to maintain their current friendships and nearly three-quarters use them to make plans with friends.
Social media researcher Danah Boyd has pointed out that social network sites could be considered mainstream gathering spaces. After World War II, companies began marketing directly to teens, resulting in public arenas—dance halls, roller rinks, bowling alleys—where they could socialize unchaperoned. These venues have largely disappeared; SNS have filled the void. “By allowing youth to hang out amongst their friends and classmates, social network sites are providing teens with a space to work out identity and status, make sense of cultural cues, and negotiate public life,” Boyd wrote.
In this sense, SNS can serve the same function as the cafeteria, a place at which to socialize outside of classes and a mostly unsupervised area that has the potential both to create new friendships and to segregate students further.
SNS opponents decry the demise of traditional communication, worrying that kids are becoming disconnected screen zombies, faces alit by the blue glow, unable to tear themselves away. Well, not so fast. The stereotype of the adult computer addict—up at all hours, immersed in virtual reality, cruising for cybersex, trapped in an online gambling addiction, or creating various falsely representative alter egos—largely does not apply to teens. A 2009 Nielsen report claimed that U.S. teenagers spend “far less time” on the Internet than adults.
Usually students don’t intend their online profiles to be separate from their real identity. High schoolers told me that SNS can ease introductions among classmates. A recent survey found that college students spent more time with SNS friends in person than online. Additionally, a telecommunications study of college students set out to determine “whether offline social capital can be generated by online tools.” Social capital involves the abilities to form new relationships, maintain current social connections, and integrate into a community. The researchers concluded that their findings “demonstrate a robust connection between Facebook usage and indicators of social capital. . . . Internet use alone did not predict social capital accumulation, but intensive use of Facebook did.”
Facebook and MySpace profiles are not only mechanisms to connect with other people; they also provide a canvas onto which a student can project his desired identity. Students can reveal opinions, interests, and activities that they don’t get the chance to share or don’t feel comfortable publicizing at school. As a shy Texas senior explained, a profile “allows me to learn new facts about a person who I normally don’t talk to, which naturally spills over to the way I treat them in person.”
The identities displayed on SNS are also constructed by the network of a person’s friends. This feature not only visually maps out connections but also, thanks to the Top Friends application, orders them in a public hierarchy. Or exposes attempted social climbing; some kids use the term “friend eaters” to refer to people who collect online friends to pad their network and create an illusion of popularity. In a study conducted at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, undergraduates reported having an average of 455 Facebook friends (the maximum was 2,000 and the minimum was 4). Yet these same students averaged seven close friends. “In choosing [Top Friends], teens write their community into being, which is precisely why this feature is so loved and despised,” Boyd observed.
The dangers of SNS are less commonly media-driven fears of predatory adults than the same exclusionary behavior prevalent in the cafeteria. Consider the photos. “Pictures on Facebook are vital for high school,” a Florida senior said. “People can feel betrayed if they weren’t invited to a party. As soon as a new album is added, everyone looks at it, so within minutes everyone’s outfits are critiqued. If you were to look through the average girl’s Facebook inbox there would be hundreds of links to bad pictures of people with messages like ‘OMG what is she wearing’ or ‘AHAHA, IS SHE SERIOUS.’ ”
Pictures, comments, and status updates also let students keep tabs on each other, a common pastime called falking, or Facebook stalking. “It’s like you never really get away from your peers,” said a Massachusetts scene kid. “It’s like they’re always watching you.” A New York junior said this issue causes her social anxiety. “Although I love Facebook, I think it was quite possibly the worst invention in the world,” she said. “On Facebook, I prepare myself to find something that I didn’t want to know.”
These sites can take Boyd’s idea of writing oneself into being even farther, as words on a profile instantaneously can fuel widespread gossip. “It’s practically minute-to-minute on who’s breaking up and hooking up,” said an Iowa overachiever. A Long Island outcast added, “You’ll hear a conversation in the halls, ‘Did you hear they were going out?’ and the other person will say, ‘No way, don’t believe that. Facebook didn’t say it yet.’ It’s as if Facebook is the God of the school, and nothing is official until Facebook says it’s true.”
Naturally teens are bolder in the online cafeteria than they are when face-to-face. Students nationwide told me about Facebook groups devoted to insulting a classmate, much like the I Hate Danielle club. Students at a New York school created a fake Facebook profile for a girl and posted racial slurs and nasty comments about her. Within the first week, the phony profile already had fifty “friends” signed up to make fun of the girl. Certain Facebook applications expand the artillery for kids who want to bully a classmate. Students told me about quizzes that publicly ask questions such as “Does [insert name]’s breath stink?” or “Is [insert name] ugly?” An application called “Friend FAQ” asks people questions about their friends and posts the answers. An eighth grader in the Midwest learned from this application that a friend thought she needed to lose weight. “Facebook can totally ruin people’s lives,” she said.
Indeed, studies have found that the frequency with which teenagers use SNS affects their self-esteem and well-being. At a time when students are most influenced by feedback from peers, sites like Facebook and MySpace serve as constant vehicles for such assessments. Kids can feel pressured to turn their profiles into never-ending commercials for themselves. Remember the imaginary audience discussed in chapter 4? Researchers have said that teenagers “tend to overestimate the extent to which others are watching and evaluating, and, as a result, can be extremely preoccupied with how they appear in the eyes of others.” The problem with online cafeterias is that the audience turns out to be not so imaginary after all.
REGAN, GEORGIA | THE WEIRD GIRL
At the LGBT youth center, Regan approached the volunteer coordinator’s desk to say hello. The coordinator’s eyes lit up when he saw her. “We’re going to have an opening fo
r a facilitator! You’ll be perfect!”
After months of sitting at the front desk, welcoming kids and signing them in, Regan would now be a moderator for a regular girls-only group discussion. The position was ideal for her; she hoped to do something similar next fall, when she planned to teach English at a school in Bangladesh. The school was run by a women’s organization that hoped an education would prevent girls from getting caught up in trafficking.
Regan was especially thrilled about the youth center promotion and her Bangladesh trip because she loved working with adolescents. “I’m really interested in what teenagers have to say. They are an often overlooked demographic,” she said. “They’re sort of idealistic, and a lot of people try to stifle that, but I think it’s important to cultivate that attitude. If we all had the ideas and drive of teenagers, a lot more could get done in the world.”
REGAN’S CHALLENGE
By resigning at the end of the school year, Regan worried that she was leaving many of her students without a teacher to whom they could turn for nonacademic help or advice. She wanted to find a way to leave a legacy that encouraged students to accept people who were different from them. When I challenged her to form a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) at James Johnson, she readily agreed.
“I know I’m going to be met with a lot of negativity, but I also feel that a GSA should be available in every high school,” Regan said. She knew what it took to start up such a club; she had founded the GSA at her own Vermont high school. “It’s amazing that, of all people, my demographic of students is completely judgmental of a marginalized group. They are incredibly hypocritical, complaining about injustices due to race, yet calling each other ‘gay’ and ‘faggot.’ School is supposed to be a safe place for all students, and I’d like that to be true.”
The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory, and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School Page 21
