Analysis Of American Girls: Social Media And The Secret Lives Of Teenagers

More and more people are changing their way of dating especially adolescent girls. Social media, dating applications, and pornography are the major contribution to the changes. Thanks to those outlets, expectations from these girls are higher than ever. Girls’ digital lives are affecting their in person social lives more ways than ever.

On an episode of “Fresh Air,” Terry Gross, the host of the show, had a discussion with Nancy Jo Sales about teenage girls. Sales is the author of “American Girls: Social Media And The Secret Lives of Teenagers.” Sales has been writing about kids for nearly two decades. She spent about two and half year alone researching with a few hundred girls across multiple states and also depended on experts that study

Hashtags is used to categorize a certain topic. Places like Yik Yak uses these categorize system. It is also a place where Sales was able to look for contents about what young people are posting. She found a hashtag called Syracusesnap, which shows sexual and violent images (Gross, 2016). It is an easy hashtag to understand, it is a combination of Syracuse University and Snapchat. Hashtags can also be intricate. So, it won’t be easy to be found. They can use any innocent words as a hashtag and it becomes disguise for a place to share those types of imageries. Yik Yak is a place where users can remain anonymous. Anonymous identity is correlation to thrive of

There was a study done showing ninety percent of American adolescents uses social media, and seventy-five percent of them using social networking sites and almost thirty-five percent of those users are checking their social media feed multiple times a day (Kircaburun, 2016). Thanks to the mobile phones with always connected internet, it allow adolescents to check their feed multiple times a day. Even though checking numerous times throughout the day doesn’t define someone as addict because currently there isn’t a specific scale that could be use categorize an addict for social media usages. Study have shown that adolescent have used more than one source of social networking outlets (Bányai et al., 2017). Signs have shown social media have affected problematic teens with depression.

Social media can heighten depression in low-esteem adolescent. Adolescent with low self-esteem have difficulties fitting in and might be relying on social media to create a new persona to express himself or herself. This is also where most depressed teen are faced with cyberbullying. They would compared themselves to