In this hot discussion about youth and social media, I’ve been quite interested in the debate of the fairest metaphor. I think most of them hit on fair but different angles: smoking (harm), driving (safety), and gambling (addictiveness).
I remember my 10 years on social media as being as addicting and anxiety-inducing as the research shows, but I also found it cognitively demanding– like an intense board game. Growing up as a chronically online Gen Z girl in Silicon Valley, the social games of online life felt a lot like chess. Like chess, there are rules. Post too little and people will forget about you, but post too much and you’ll look desperate or too online. Post too much of your opinions of current events and you’ll look like you’re virtue signaling, but post too little and you’ll look privileged and ignorant. Also like chess, strategy is essential. Each feature– disappearing messages, stories, snapmaps, etc– provide a myriad of ways to make a move, with the possible reward of leveling up in the adolescent food chain.
My friend and I recalled some of the most popular social media chess moves:
1. Turning off the “Likes” count on an Instagram post so that in case you don’t get enough likes no one will know. But if you reach an acceptable number, you turn it back on as a signal of popularity to your peers. You can signal your superiority to the status game of Likes by turning it off (which, of course, is still playing the status game) or play if you know you’re winning.
2. Following people you don’t really know but you know would follow you, and once you see that they have followed you back, unfollow them so your follow count increases and you look more popular. Although not as popular of a notion as it used to be (but still around), this keeps your “ratio” (ratio of who follows you to who you follow) higher with who follows you.
3. Creating multiple “private stories” that signal degrees of intimacy to your friend groups. (The story feature is where users can post content for 24 hours. It was popularized on Snapchat but has been adopted on various other platforms including Instagram and Whatsapp.)
4. Posting a cute (often provocative) photo on your story to get a particular person’s attention but after removing everyone on your friend’s list so that only the intended person sees it. Pretending that it’s a public post allows one to indirectly reach out to someone (ideally, they “swipe up” on your post and initiate conversation” because sending them the photo directly would be perceived being over-eager.
I do not say these from on high but from the confessional, I was a chess grandmaster- a gramaster, if you will. And yet, this was life. Adults just thought it was the new hip thing, and as kids we were none the wiser. Computer scientist Paul Graham discusses the idea of what you “want to want,” meaning that we not only have wants, but also what we want to want. I may not want to eat vegetables, but I definitely want to want to eat vegetables. I may want to be a billionaire, but I don’t want to want to be a billionaire. My concern is that teenagers on social media want to win the online chess game, but are also being taught it’s cool to want to want to win it. Of the many useful skills that life demands is the list above something we want young people to master? Looking into my recent past, I am regretful that I wanted to win the game, but even more that I wanted to want to win, too.
There is a big push to make social media safer, and I am wholly behind these endeavors. But part of cultivating well-being online must consider that teenagers will always find a way to use what is at hand to establish a pecking order amongst themselves. The results are the ridiculous but perfectly reasonable social moves I listed above. Social media provides a constant stream of reminders of where you fall in the pecking order– views, likes, reposts, etc– at a time when one is already very aware and concerned about status. The discussion about youth and social media must also consider that you could spend very little time on social media, post only “wholesome” content, and still engage in an unnecessary perpetuation of the social order that is particularly tempting as a teenager.
Even if we were to find a way to make social media safer, it would still be far too much information about the lives of many more people than we have the capacity to know well, divert our attention from our inner worlds to the outer world, and displace time to engage in a beautifully frictionful real world upbringing. Every generation before Gen Z went through adolescence without being chronically online, and yet in just the span of my generation’s upbringing we have forgotten that social media-free living is a viable option.
If someone were to tell 14-year-old me that I would regret all the time I spent online, I would have been skeptical or outright indignant. I am glad that more and more young people are waking up, and I am optimistic that social media will be wholly displaced from the social lives of young people. The movement against the takeover of childhood is moving quickly and I trust it will go far, but we need every last youth voice to speak up and outsmart the status quo keeping social media where it is. Only then will we straighten the crooked path for the rest of Gen Z and Gen Alpha.
Checkmate.