What's your favorite social media site?
What makes a good profile pic on that site?
Each social media site has its own unwritten rules about profile pics, and looking deeper into teen choices about them reveal issues of identity development, as well as emotional abuse.
When you turn 13, you're suddenly of legal age to join the world of social media.
If you're a 12yo, like the 7th graders in my Social Media Safety class, you might have a social media account already, on the conditions that you already own a smartphone, and your parents allow you to create online accounts. If you don't, it is because one or both of those conditions are false.
"But everyone else at school has an Instagram!"
Can a child younger than age 13 use social media?
Social media sites are all regulated by COPPA, the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, which sets limits on data collection from users under age 13.
The enforcement and effectiveness of COPPA is, apparently, about as potent as MPAA's PG-13 rating, because when I ask my 12yo students if they use some form of social media regularly, 80-90% of them raise their hands.
They also all admit to having seen a PG-13 movie.
COPPA has had 24 cases in 14 years, which is an indication of the level of enforcement.
Pew Research Center on Internet, Science and Tech published findings from this year about teen trends in social media use, and this gender divide graph gets at a fundamental difference in the use of the profile pic:
CNN recently debuted #Being13, a documentary about what it looks like at age 13 these days, when suddenly a child has entered their teenage years, at the beginning of (perhaps a lifetime of) social media use.
The caption below this image reads: "I like made this google document on all my rules and requirements on how to take a selfie. I take a lot of pictures, but don't judge, I take like 100 usually, or like 150, maybe 200 sometimes if I really can't get a right one."
A Google Image Search on Instagram profile pics yields this array:
It might be hard to see, and you can click here to see for yourself, but nearly all of these profile pics are faces of (presumably) the actual account holders.
I corroborated this presumption with my 7th graders, who confirm that this is indeed the trend on Instagram. That way, even though your username might be different from your real name, your followers will know whose account it is. At least in teen Instagram land, this is important. Besides, if you're going to post a selfie, everyone will know it's your account anyway.
There's little room for anonymity in teen Instagram land.
Let's jump to the other side of the gender spectrum, where (according to Pew) 84% of teen boys play online games.
A Google Image Search of "gamer profile pics" produces a very different result:
None of these images are a teen's actual face, and in this search, there's a naked woman holding a game controller.
There are very few selfies in gaming culture.
Anonymity is very important among gamers.
I ask my students why this is? Boys explain that if you post your actual face, everyone will make fun of you.
Why?
"Because that's just how it works."
That is a loaded response. We spent some time unpacking that one.
The trouble with anonymity in gamer culture is well documented in the news surrounding #gamergate.
My students were quick to point out the cons of anonymity:
"You can hit and run."
What's that?
"It's when you say something mean and get away with it, because no one knows who you are."
Gamer culture is changing, thanks in no small part to Feminist Frequency's series Tropes Vs Women in Video Games, which is A+ fantastic, and many of the videos are appropriate for the classroom (screen them first obvs!)
In my classroom, by pointing out this dramatic difference in profile pic culture, I was shocked how quickly I found myself at the gates to this world of online abuse.
Back in teen Instagram land, when talking about pros and cons of the selfie profile pic, I quickly received this response:
"You can make yourself look really pretty & fancy."
Indeed, some of the most popular photo editing apps offer specific tools to whiten your teeth, shape your eyebrows, raise your cheekbones, enlarge your eyes, erase blemishes, and more.
Identity development is hard work, and it takes a lot of support from friends and family to get through those teen years and stay afloat.
All of this brings back some memories of my middle school years for sure.
The #Being13 takeaway that opened my eyes as a teacher guiding 13yos safely into their online lives is that the difficulties they encounter can be greatly lessened simply if their parents follow their accounts.
That's great to know! If you're reading this, you might want to consider sharing with parents the linked article above about #Being13, as well as the documentary itself. Parents I've talked to that watched it expressed the importance of viewing it with their teens at home.
It led me to a question:
If we know that middle schoolers need guidance IRL (in real life), might they need just as much guidance in online spaces? If they receive guidance not only from their parents IRL, but also from their teachers, coaches, other family members etc, perhaps more of these folks ought to be a part of their online life, too?
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