My youngest niece and I could not be more different. For one, I am 42 and Arianna is 17. But we have a few things in common.
We're
both the youngest of three, and we both have a small cluster of
ailments that swim together in the Kalem gene pool: eczema, allergies.
We both grew up in regions overwrought with conformism—she in Boca
Raton, Fla., me on Long Island, N.Y. But in terms of our adolescent
experience—which she is very much in the midst of, and I, when I am
honest with myself, feel like I never completely left behind—we may as
well have come of age on different planets.
Arianna and her friends, like me and mine, were, once upon a time,
fascinated with IRL popularity. That changed for them when they became
the subject of social scrutiny, but not in the way I'd dreamed of—with
party invitations, cute surfer-stoners idling on the curb outside of my
house, and a Veronica Sawyer-like grip on both the popular kids and the
misfits. Instead, where I found pen pals in the back pages of
Star Hits and called 1-900 party lines, Arianna and her friends are famous on the Internet.
As of this writing, my 17-year-old niece has more than 45,000 followers
on Instagram. At one point she had closer to 50,000. Her number of
followers jumped significantly when she started dating her now
ex-boyfriend, Dylan, who at the time had around 25,000. They earned an
Instagram celeb nickname—#darianna, a la Brangelina. Every photo
she posts gets, by my unscientific calculations, an average of 2,000 to
4,000 likes. The ones of just her or her and a few of her girlfriends
dressed up (or down, as the case is on a beach day)—as opposed to the
ones where she's with a mixed-gender group, goofing off in science lab
or at McDonalds, or photos of my sister on Mother's Day, about to dig
her gift out of a Tory Burch shopping bag—get closer to 5,000. Her photos always get 10 or more comments, and usually closer to 50. She deletes the ones that are negative, toward her or toward other people.
For some reason, a lot of her followers—her fans—are from Brazil, and
other countries, too. "They comment in other languages all the time,"
she tells me. "I wonder if they think I can understand them? Or what the
point is? But some of it isn't even in the English alphabet."
Chances are
they're saying something about how perfect she is, how gorgeous her
hair or eyes are, or asking where she got that top. That's what a lot of
the comments say. One favorite around my house is simply "sex with
you." Not "I want to have..." but simply the idea, expressed: "sex with
you." It's not real-world desire; my
niece isn't necessarily real to them. The images she posts,
the comments she allows to remain, it all paints a picture of a life to
be admired and commented on. In short, it's what a whole lot of us do
with social media. She's just really, really good at it.
My niece and her friends have blogs devoted to them, written by younger
girls in their area code and beyond. Their social media accounts are
hacked and impersonated. They are recognized at concerts and at malls.
But when you talk to them—as I do, usually when I visit in the fall,
descending upon their air-conditioned environs with my tattoos and fun
belly and Korean-American husband like a plague of "other" blowing in
from the west—they are lovely and polite, spending no more time hunched
over their girly-pink iPhone cases than, say, my aforementioned husband.
They toss
their shiny hair and smile their orthodontic smiles, laugh at my jokes
about viral videos, shrug off questions of what they want to be when
they grow up, and otherwise act like, well, decently-adjusted,
middle-class teenage girls.
Arianna, along with her friends, became "obsessed" with Tumblr in the
eighth grade. They made videos of themselves dancing, and
Savannah—Arianna's best friend, then and now—edited them with iMovie and
posted them to Tumblr. And then Savannah got a boyfriend, Jared. And
they made a video.
"The age
group that Tumblr is for," according to Ari, "are people who are trying
to find themselves. It's all about you and your interests. And one of
the things people are interested in at that age, and are looking for, is
a boyfriend. They're so in love with the idea of love. And they really
do seem like seem like they're in love in the videos, and I think a lot
of people just fell in love with the fact that they were in love."
That
first video
might melt your brain a little if you are, say, over the age of 30: an
eighth-grade couple, looking older than they are, shooting pool and
making out, singing along to Maroon 5's "Heart's in Stereo" in the back
of a parent's car, getting photo-bombed by Savannah's little brother,
and professing their love for each other. He's sometimes shirtless and
she is often wearing teeny-tiny shorts. The tops of their heads are
usually out of frame. It's awkward and discomfiting and painfully
sweet—in short, somehow a perfect encapsulation of tween romance.
And so, like any photos or videos of couples kissing, it was popular.
"Every
day," Arianna recalls, "it just kept getting more and more notes, and we
were all so excited because to have one of your pictures or videos get a
lot of notes is pretty much a huge compliment. And so from that she got
a lot of followers. So she posted another video of her relationship and
that, too, got hundreds of thousands of notes. And before we knew it,
she had hundreds of thousands of followers."
The last
time Arianna remembers checking it, the first video had at least three
million views on YouTube. That original posting isn't available anymore,
and it's impossible to figure out whether or not channels like
this one are Savannah's or a fan site.
"Surprisingly,
a lot of her stuff gets reported," says Arianna. "People say that it's a
fake account, just so they can pretend to be the real account. Most of
her accounts get deleted."
But Savannah's
Tumblr is
insanely popular. You can't see her follower count, but Arianna says
Savannah "got bigger than anyone ever has ever been on Tumblr without
being a celebrity first." Savannah has a fraction of the followers that,
say, Kylie Jenner has on Instagram and Twitter. But Kylie Jenner was
famous before she got all of those followers.
And Kylie Jenner follows Savannah.
"Wherever we go with Savannah, she gets recognized," says Arianna. "At
the Drake vs. Lil Wayne concert, wherever we go, you just see the
expression on people's faces. Not just young people, either. There were
30-year-olds saying, 'Oh, that's that girl from Instagram,' or, 'It's
that Tumblr girl.'" From being associated with Savannah, Arianna ended
up with thousands of followers of her own
on Tumblr. "Then, Instagram came out, and for some reason, that just made everything explode."
Savannah ended up with more than 500,000 followers; by association,
Arianna got about 20,000 of her own. "A couple months later is when
'Trill Fam' began, and for some reason, the followers loved that." Trill
Fam was the combination of Arianna and Savannah's friends and Jared's
friends. They named themselves after Trill Entertainment, a record label
out of Baton Rouge, and the girls became BBOD ("bad bitches or die"),
the boys HHOD ("Hypnotiq hooligans or die"). Arianna's Instagram handle,
"aritunechii," references Lil Wayne's nickname.
"Because we were in 8th grade," Arianna says, "and we thought we were funny. We thought we were bad."
When I was in middle school, my girlfriends and I had a club called
ILBC (the "I love boys club"); our theme songs were Bonnie Tyler's
"Total Eclipse of the Heart" and Quiet Riot's cover of "Cum on Feel the
Noize." Nobody cared but us.
The group's
popularity grew. "All of us began frequently making it to the popular
page of Instagram, where more people would discover us," Arianna
explains. And then, early last year, when Arianna was 16, she started
dating Dylan, a boy who had gone to their high school but had graduated
the year before.
Here's a video
of him asking her to be his girlfriend, essentially, as filmed by
Savannah and with a special guest appearance by my sister, Ari's mom.
Dylan and Arianna—#darianna—went out for about a year and a half.
That's a little longer than I went out with my one real high school
boyfriend, which was a pretty big deal to me at the time, even without
the Internet.
I was badly
bullied at my high school, so any romantic physical contact I'd had
with classmates had been on the down-low. I met my boyfriend, Adam, at
my summer job, and he lived a few towns over. He drove a late-50s
vintage car, turned me on to the Velvet Underground, and was one of the
coolest people I'd ever met while still being totally sweet. I broke up
with him shortly before prom, because I felt badly that he liked me more
than I him.
As it turns out, that's pretty much how Arianna felt about her breakup
with Dylan, in spite of the fact that her relationship had very public
stakes. When I asked her whether she thought her relationship would have
been different if she only had a handful of social media followers, she
said she doesn't think so.
"I started dating him because he was [part of Trill Fam], and so we
were hanging out 24-7, that kind of thing. But Instagram as a part of
it? Not so much. I just posted pictures. I
liked getting likes on them. But I didn't post them to get likes on them."
And when
they broke up, she says, "I never even announced to my followers or
anything that we broke up. I just changed my bio so it didn't say 'love
Dylan Baitz' anymore. I just erased it and he erased his, so they
finally figured it out."
Now, months later—though she still gets tweets and Tumblr messages
asking why they broke up—if you Google "darianna" you're just as likely
to get results on singer-songwriter Darianna Everett as you are Tumblr
blogs devoted to my niece and her former boyfriend.
As for me
and my high school flame, well, we're friends on Facebook, and I always
try to wish him a happy birthday there with a nostalgic music video
link. I ended up going to prom with my best girlfriend.
A lot of the women my age who see the large number of Arianna's
followers assume that the majority of them are adult men. Arianna
disagrees, insisting that most of them are teenage girls.
"I've
received hundreds, maybe even thousands of messages from girls who say
that I'm their role model or that I inspire them in some way," she says.
"Most of my fans are in middle school, so I try to act as appropriate
as I can so I don't set a bad example."
She doesn't
talk shit online, either. "I think that I learned to be a nice person
because I didn't want to be a mean person in front of fans or for
friends to see." (For the record, she is sometimes mean to her sisters,
and they to her, so she's not, you know, abnormal or anything.) She
tries not to curse in her tweets, and doesn't post anything illegal—so
no drinking photos or pictures of her friends getting trashed.
Of course, other people do post those pictures, and they tag her. So
there are plenty of photos of her out there, surrounded by red Solo
cups. There is only so much image curation she can do.
"There was
one point I really started hating it," she says. "And that's when I
realized that all of the pictures I've posted of me and that other
people have posted can be easily found." But she keeps things positive
in her own comments with the careful eye of someone who is building both
a self-image and a brand.
That image curation is a big piece of what my generation of teenagers
was missing: if you couldn't perform cool or pretty with enough skill,
you were outed as neither. There was no second life online. You played
the hand you were dealt, which means that, no matter how rich my
adolescent fantasy life, I was not glamorous or even witty to my high
school peers. I was one of a small brand of freaks, and not the one the
football players secretly wanted to date, or the one with the elaborate
makeup who looked like she stepped out of a John Hughes movie.
Perhaps I
would have self-created on social media, if I'd had it. Or perhaps I'd
have been just as sensitive and eager to please on the Internet, and it
would have been my downfall, as it was in the halls of my high school.
"We've been taught at so many assemblies not to bully that I think
there aren't bullies anymore," says Arianna. "Not like there used to
be—stealing your lunch money and picking on you in dodgeball."
But there's
cyber-bullying, which feels more dangerous to me. With cyber-bullying,
there's only so many times you can tell yourself that it will get
better, that somewhere out there are people who will understand you.
Because there is much harder evidence on your iPhone that somewhere out
there are people who want to hurt you.
Arianna, for her part, cannot recall ever being bullied. When other
kids have gotten picked on in her comments, she has deleted the bullies.
And the only strangers' messages she responds to are those from people
who talk about getting bullied, "or who have something in their life
really getting them down." She has messaged these people privately, and
made connections with some that way, connections that have lasted a year
or two. Most of what she has seen has taken place in middle
school—among her own tween classmates (which was wa-a-ay back in the
Myspace days) or, later, with her primarily younger demographic.
But, she says, "people definitely still have Twitter beef, the
sub-tweeting and mean tweets." It's easy to make fake accounts, too, and
that's a way of bullying: impersonating someone else, not to live in
their skin (as the fake accounts devoted to Arianna and Savannah do),
but rather to lampoon them, put words in their mouths.
This kind of impersonation, of course, is not new. It's just easier.
The author in high school.
When I was
in eleventh grade, I started getting phone calls from a boy. He said he
was someone my friends and I had met at a dance club; I made up a fake
boyfriend to keep him at arm's length, but kept taking his calls. I
guess I was flattered. At some point he stopped calling, or maybe I
stopped answering.
But shortly
after that, one of our group, Kristina, confided in me that the boy
who'd been calling me had actually been the older boyfriend of
another friend. And that most of the people we hung out with
had, at one point or another, been in the room with him, laughing at my
fake boyfriend, at my gullibility, my desperation.
Sometime not too long after I headed off to college, I learned how to
curate my image. I got myself what I thought was a pretty cool nickname,
grew out my perm, and traded the long black coat and cheap pointy
buckle boots for Chinese slippers and vintage dresses sloppily cut into
minis. I took down fat sacs of weed and went dancing at smoky Southern
rock clubs. And nearly no one who had gone to my high school followed,
so my secret was safe.
I still curate my image; we all do. But as adults, we are a bit more
careful with our brands than we would have been as teenagers. And while
Arianna has been good at painting one kind of picture, she is now
worried about how that picture will play in her immediate future.
"I was scared that colleges would Google my name," she says, "and
wonder, 'what did this girl do?,' and if it would affect admissions. But
my teachers convinced me that, with this generation, people don't care
that much. We all have stuff on the internet. And they don't have time
to Google everyone that applies to college. But I want to be able to,
when I go off to college, just be able to contact people I know from my
hometown, see all their comments on my photos, not all these little
girls and Brazilians."
She contemplates just deleting her accounts after graduation next
spring, starting fresh, just like me. Maybe starting an account so she
can just keep in touch with the people she actually knows. But it's more
complicated than that for her. Unless all of her friends jump ship,
too, the fans will come calling, find her through an errant tag, and the
whole thing starts over again. Unlike me, she doesn't have the luxury
of time—and the technological lag time between centuries—to ditch her
followers.
But she has gone back to Tumblr more often lately, to look at
photography, and to Twitter to read funny posts. She posts to Instagram
less and less frequently. As a user, she is starting to look out at the
world, rather than inviting it to look at her.
Part of Arianna's brand-building has been not posting photos wherein she looks bad. And as hopefully as I showed her the
"Pretty Girls Making Ugly Faces" Tumblr—praying
she'd get the hint that life is not all about what's on the outside—I
know that, when I was a teenager, I desperately wanted to be pretty. I
wanted to be perceived as funny, too, and smart. But I really, really
wanted to be pretty.
And even
now, though I readily make fun of myself on social media and spend most
of my online space on my writing and causes I support, I may also be the
fastest-untagger-of-unflattering-photos in the west.
One of the first things that struck me about Arianna's social media
celebrity—on Instagram, in particular—is how many comments declare her
perfection. I assumed it would give a person a big head, or put pressure
on them to perform; Arianna denies both. "I definitely think that other
things affect me more, like coming across a picture of Tumblr of a
bunch of pretty girls. Or seeing a really perfect body on Tumblr, a
really skinny girl. That makes me more pressured than them calling me
perfect."
So, like so many women, Ari falls into trap of thinking she's not good
enough, with most positive compliments not really sinking in. She
understands that it's all relative, and in our conversation tried to
imagine posting an ugly photo one day. "I hope they wouldn't call me
ugly. I hope that they would be like, eh, she's still pretty. Would I
ever? Yeah, I don't care that much."
That perceived perfection is up in the air, on servers, in our phones
and tablets, but not in our physical space. The elementary school
fangirls and grammatically challenged fanboys are, for the most part, no
realer to my niece than she is to them. Sometimes I wonder: if I had
had social media, constructed an identity online, gotten outfit
critiques from glamorous strangers and mixtapes from boys in the U.K.,
would I have ever bothered to connect with real people at university?
"I've written many essays about this," says my niece, "always backed up
by studies about how it makes us antisocial, and we can't communicate
the same way. I was taught to think that. And now I think, who would
have thought you could get famous by posting pictures on Instagram? It's
a different way of communicating. The internet as a whole may be taking
a toll on the way we communicate face-to-face. But I think it is also
opening up a variety of ways we can communicate."
But, I protested, her becoming famous is one-way. She's posting images,
beaming one-way, and people are commenting and saying she's so cool,
she's so perfect. If I walked up to her in the mall and complimented
her, she would have to respond to me. But if I write that on her photo,
she doesn't have to do anything.
"You're right," Arianna says. "But also, if someone from another
country commented and I wanted to write back, I could. And that would be
a person that I would have never come across if it wasn't for social
media. If I decided to make a business and I wanted to advertise my
business, it's a huge advertisement opportunity. Or if I wanted everyone
to sign a petition for world hunger, I could do that."
Both of those things are kinds of selling, and selling is, no doubt,
what so many of us are doing online. Social media teaches my niece about
the world; she teaches the world about Boca. And soon she'll head out,
and leave as much of it behind as she's willing or able to. Maybe she'll
delete all of her accounts; maybe just one or two. Maybe she'll even
get a nickname.
Culled from Jezebel
