Lila liked to think of herself as a bridge between friend groups. All through her sophomore year of high school, she stayed close with two different groups. This was somewhat unusual: the social circles in her grade were pretty clearly defined, and most girls were in just one primary social circle. In Lila’s case, each of the two friend groups had a group chat. She was active in both.
Group chats are multiperson digital conversations. They take place on different social media or messaging platforms, and they’re key to many teens’ social lives. Group chats provide a context for teens to share ongoing updates and relevant content throughout the day. They also fuel inside jokes and enable coordination for in-person plans. Those who aren’t part of the chat miss out on those plans, as well as ongoing banter and inside jokes that solidify closeness among chat group members. From a technical standpoint, starting or ending a group chat is simple. But the social dynamics can be decidedly complex.
As tenth grade wore on, Lila began to feel less like a bridge between the groups and their respective chats and more like a double agent. One group—self-dubbed “the OGs”—didn’t know Lila was in “the Hunnies” chat, and she was pretty sure they wouldn’t have been okay with it. Lila became increasingly anxious that her cover would be blown, and she’d be pushed out of the group. This proved to be prescient.
Initially, the Hunnies seemed okay knowing Lila was in both chats. Then, messaging in the Hunnies chat slowed, and Lila discovered they had created a spinoff chat without her. She didn’t really blame them or think the spinoff group was created maliciously; she had been hanging out more with the OGs and declining social invitations from the Hunnies as a result. But she realized with dismay that not being in the main Hunnies chat would result in being sidelined in person too. This wasn’t melodramatic: she was right. Although Lila kept up individual friendships, she was instantly moved to the periphery of the Hunnies friend group and social plans.
“Could I have asked to be added to their new group chat?,” she wondered aloud a year later. “Maybe. But I knew they made the new chat expressly with the purpose of taking me out.” Without membership in that chat, Lila was no longer a full member of their crew.
Group chats can shape or define offline social circles for boys too. When Lila’s younger brother tried to add a friend to his core group chat—which also had its own name and norms—he had to lobby his friends to include the new member. And just as Lila’s exclusion from the Hunnies chat had ripple effects for offline hangouts, her brother’s inclusion of his new friend conferred immediate acceptance and inclusion. Another boy, Bradley, described the importance of group chats across a much wider group at his high school. In this case, a large group chat was the context for planning a senior prank, meaning that anyone who wasn’t in the chat was therefore clueless about the caper.
Much of what these teens shared is not new: the profound importance to adolescents of acceptance from friends, the vigilant attention to one’s place in the teen social landscape, and even the inclination to name friend groups in a way that clearly signals who’s in and, by extension, who’s out. Long before there were group chats to name, a self-assigned moniker was a way to seal and confirm a group’s closeness. I (Carrie) was a teen in the 1980s, and I remember my friends referring to ourselves at one point as “The Breakfast Club.” And I (Emily) cringe at the memory of friend group names that were formed with the first initial of each person’s name and then renamed as middle school alliances changed. The adolescent desire to solidify and signal closeness is hardly a product of the digital age. It endures today, as portrayed vividly in the Netflix series Ginny and Georgia, when Ginny and her friends Max, Ashley, and Norah name their group—and group chat—“MANG.” (Importantly, though intimate adolescent friendships and related concerns are often understood to be a “girl” thing, boys both need and deeply value intimate friendships too.1)
Despite concerns about superficial social media likes and text communication altering the very fabric of friendship, research shows that the age-old qualities that make or break friendships endure. Psychologists Joanna Yau and Stephanie Reich reviewed evidence from multiple studies and found that technology is essentially just another medium for core adolescent friendship activities like self-disclosure, validation, companionship, instrumental support, conflict, and conflict resolution.2 And yet, they explain, digital communication is different in ways that matter both for better and worse in how friendships play out.
What is different—and how? Adolescent psychologists have leaned into this question too. Jacqueline Nesi, Sophia Choukas‑Bradley, and Mitch Prinstein’s work unpacks the ways peer relationships are transformed by social media contexts.3 Their Transformation Framework highlights how specific social media affordances alter peer dynamics. For example, both publicness and quantified metrics (e.g., likes and followers) transform the longstanding importance of validation by creating new opportunities to showcase closeness and new signals of peer acceptance—or a lack thereof.
Quantifiability is salient when teens like Judah see that a friend’s Snapchat Snap score increased while he was waiting for that friend to reply. Because a Snap score publicly reveals the total number of snaps (i.e., Snapchat messages) a person has ever sent and received, Judah knows instantly that his friend was responding to others—while leaving Judah’s messages unread or “on read” (i.e., seen but not reciprocated). Publicness can likewise clue teens into social slights: virtual maps on Snapchat, for example, show avatars of where people are in real-time. So when Sophie checks the map one Saturday and sees her friends’ avatars all together in one place, it’s crystal clear that she’s been left out. In these ways, social technologies enable ongoing access to new kinds of social information.
The qualities of social media transform the social landscape in ways that raise new norms and complications too. Fifteen-year-old Winter put it starkly: “maintaining friendships online is a completely different ball game, and it has its own set of rules and regulations.” There are also ways to deepen existing friendships, and to make new friends as teens connect through online gaming, over shared interests on social media, and via expansive friends-of-friends networks. Social media is both a burden and a boon. And while the opportunities are tremendous and real, this chapter is about often overlooked friendship pressures and dilemmas.
In our surveys of young people, a clear majority (71 percent of youths) agreed that being a good friend means being there whenever a friend needs you. It’s no wonder, then, that new kinds of access contribute to dilemmas for young people about reasonable boundaries for digital availability. How much connection is too much? What response time is just right? Answers are hard to come by.
Setting boundaries in close relationships can be difficult at any age. Values are pitted against each other in ways that evade simple rules of thumb: When a friend says he needs to talk and it’s already late at night, disconnecting for sleep is pitted against being a supportive friend. When a peer’s private texts begin to sound alarming, getting them the help they need can threaten a promise of confidentiality. For teens, these dilemmas are especially hard because negotiating them requires skills like perspective taking and communication savvy that are still developing.
One sentiment is clear and expressed by teens on repeat: “I feel like if you’re not connected then the friendship will fall apart.” An immense pressure can stem from the belief that meaningful quantities of digital communication are necessary for closeness and essential to a friendship’s survival. In other words, being constantly connected—or at least consistently available—is a baseline for preserving cherished friendships. In turn, teens worry that not being available will jeopardize closeness: “If I don’t [stay connected] I’m worried I’ll miss out on something and won’t be as close to them,” one thirteen-year-old said. “If you don’t text your friends for a while then they just come up with the dumbest excuse to cut you off,” explained another.
Because friendships are crucially important during adolescence, any threat of friendship loss can feel like a true threat to a teen’s sense of who they are. It’s therefore understandable that some teens go out of their way to sustain connection, even breaking family rules or forfeiting other interests. All relationships do require a baseline level of care and feeding to thrive. But the now-boundless opportunities for connection mean that teens may have to intentionally create boundaries amid peer pressure to forgo them altogether: “There are so many people I text on a regular basis,” one fourteen-year-old explained, “and I feel pressure to keep communicating.”
It would be a mistake to assume that all teens simply accommodate constant connectivity—some do, and some do not. Oshun (fifteen years old) described ignoring people when communication is too much: “As somebody who likes my space, being in contact all the time makes me shy away from you. Like if you want to talk to me every day, I’m not gonna talk to you: I’m going to ignore you. Because I am already stressed about . . . a lot of things.” It takes a kind of confidence in one’s relationships and oneself to buck the norms of availability, though, and it’s not without downsides. Some teens describe feeling less close to friends who adopt this tack. They admit that a delayed response time feels like a slight, and for some it’s reason enough to start drama or conflict.
Response time is material. This knowledge can lead teens who share Oshun’s need for personal space to nonetheless acquiesce to burdensome communication. A key driver: being seen as rude or inconsiderate of others’ feelings. Tim noted that the volume of snaps he receives “gets annoying, especially when so many people—like 10, 12 people are snapchatting you at the same time, constantly.” Nonetheless, he stays on top of it because it’s “impolite to have someone send you something and not to respond.” Makenzie sometimes wants “to have time to myself and not talk to other people.” But this is complicated because “they always say I never ‘Hit them up’ or talk to them and it makes me feel bad for not wanting to talk to them.”4
Adults assume teens want constant connection and, while on some level they might, they can also feel stuck between craving moments of off-the-grid time and wanting to avoid “hurting people’s feelings” or “people feeling ignored.” The golden rule—treat others how you want to be treated—raises digital dilemmas. Some teens reason: “Well . . . I don’t like it when I text someone and they don’t reply for a couple days. So normally, when I get a notification of a new post or a text, I reply or check out the post pretty fast.”
Pressures to respond ASAP create another tension too—between the notifications on your phone and the people you’re with in person: “If you feel like every single time you get a text you have to text them back right away then you are putting your phone and the person you are talking to in front of the people that you are with, and it creates a habit of always checking your phone for new things.” Not wanting to appear rude, ironically, leads to being rude in a different way. Yet while adults may see what looks like thoughtlessness or “phone addiction,” teens are often navigating a constellation of hidden social motivations, pressures, and expectations. “Streaks” on Snapchat offer an interesting case in point (see the “What’s in a Streak?” box).
Tech features and social norms can collide in ways that pressure sustained contact, response times, or both. Adults may relate to the burden of having a boss or close colleague who responds to emails within minutes, or responds to every email with a Reply All even when a reply doesn’t seem warranted. In some cases, this may be the colleague’s personal style but not their expectation of others. Nonetheless, their rapid response times can generate an implicit sense that quick email replies are valued and preferred. In other cases, the boss or colleague’s explicit expectation may be that everyone responds ASAP to digital messages. Setting boundaries can be harder in these instances. The challenge of finding boundaries in digital communication is layered: it requires discerning other people’s expectations and maintaining boundaries that protect a positive relationship with each person, all while balancing personal needs. This juggling act is amplified for adolescents because of the centrality of friendships in their lives. Plus, they are still developing perspective taking and communication skills.
With close friends, rapid responses may feel necessary so friends won’t “think I ignored it” or “get mad” because they feel snubbed. With less close friends and earlier-stage relationships, a too-quick reply can come off as “eager” or “desperate.” Teens are left to walk a fine line: they try to suss out and then calibrate around peers’ expectations for response times with their own desires to seem available but not too available. That’s why some teens set timers after receiving a text message; this ensures an “optimal” response time, neither too fast nor too slow to send a message of its own. It can become a mind game, with teens’ constantly adjusting response time based on the other person’s behavior: “You respond five minutes late, Imma respond 10 minutes late. Honestly, just to be petty. I’m not going to respond right away because I look too eager to talk to you and we need to stay cool.”
While managing one’s own response time is complicated, so too is interpreting others’. “I used to think about it constantly,” fifteen-year-old Maeve explained, remembering back to the early days of her romantic relationship: “Like when my girlfriend and I were first talking, I would be like, ‘it’s been 15 minutes, shit, are we not talking anymore?’ Which is kind of ridiculous like looking back, 15 minutes is nothing—but [back] then it felt like hours or days. I think with friends, too, if they leave you ‘on read’—like read your text and you can tell, but they don’t respond—It’s kind of like, ‘oh, did I do something to offend you? What did I do?’ It’s hard to know.”
Anxiety around the timing and frequency of communication is not new, particularly in the context of romantic relationships. This modern day experience has familiar roots in age-old scenes of awaiting a long-anticipated love letter or staying within earshot of a corded phone hoping a crush will call. In digital communication, though, it’s especially easy to stare back at one’s own last message and start “second guessing . . . and even third guessing yourself.”
Design features further amplify self-doubt. Read receipts, which signal to a sender their message has been Read, can elevate the sense of being left hanging. On some apps, digital features routinely signal a forthcoming response, whether it’s the animated “. . .” speech bubble in iMessage or a push notification on Snapchat that indicates someone is typing a message. This primes and amplifies teens’ anticipatory reactions, whether curiosity, excitement, anxiety, or dread. It also puts pressure on the responder since it starts a kind of response time clock. “I don’t like that people know when I’m typing,” Diego explained, “because then I’m like, ‘Oh I gotta think about what I say before I start typing. Because they already know before you can say anything, like, ‘oh, he’s about to say something.’” Diego’s reaction points to intersecting concerns: response time matters, as does getting the message right.
Listening to teens describe “the half-swipe” again crystallizes how digital features shape their social interactions. The half-swipe is (as of this writing) a hacked-by-teens solution to a tech-created issue. To avoid the message sender knowing that their Snapchat message has been received and read, a teen can half-swipe to see a preview of the message without the app registering it as opened. This buys extra time to strategize a response. But the clock is still ticking (albeit a bit more slowly) because the snap has already been sent. And being left “on delivered” too long is seen as an even more dramatic slight.
Responses matter not only in private communication but also, and especially, in public. Seventeen-year-old Nanaa laughed as she narrated examples of over-the-top social media comments—including one that quickly became a favorite among our research team: “step on meee! i am your cockroach.” What the commenter was saying, another teen explained is, “you’re so great, so above me, so above everyone.”
You may have noticed that teens’ social media posts are often flooded with extreme flattery and effusive praise. Comments like, “You are the cutest person ever,” “MOST BEAUTIFUL HUMAN,” “MY BEST FRIEND PERIOD,” “amen,” “Obsessed wit u!,” “favorite person,” “QUEEN,” and “angel” are interspersed with emojis, hearts, and flame symbols (to connote that the person is so hot or fire). Teens portray a gendered dynamic to this mode of commenting and the pressures it creates, but expressions of public praise are not “just a girl thing.” Among boys, for example, public support can take shape in comments from one guy to another offering a virtual pat on the back for achievements (“ok I see u,” “congrats keep doing your thing bro”), supportive validation (“that’s fly,” “yessirrrr,” “handsome,” “stud”), or compliments wrapped with humor (“my man’s is wrecking homes out here,” “please my girl is on this app have some mercy,” “fellas watch out”).
Tweens and teens are not the only ones whose social media comments feature gushing compliments. Consider the following Facebook comments exchanged by and for some of the fifty- and sixty-year-olds in our lives: “Looking great <3,” “No aging for you!,” “Wow—just wow,” “What a beautiful family!,” “love love.” Or among the forty-somethings: “Hot stuff!,” “Flawless,” “Still a hottie!,” “Is this your high school graduation picture? Seriously you look the same,” “#BestJawlineEver.” Or among the twenty- and thirty-somethings: “OMG MODELS,” “Best weekend EVER,” “Beyond gorg!!!!,” “Love every single thing about this so much.”
Comments on social media are often thick with expressions of love and support. Yet their expression in a public context raises questions about what’s authentic and sincere versus obligatory and performative. For teens, posts that look joyful and flattering on the surface can also mask underlying pressures that adults may not feel. As adults are well aware, performing a carefully curated identity on social media feels essential to many youths. Teens can feel a similar pressure to perform closeness with friends in full view of an attentive audience of peers, both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness.
Comment sections become a competition: who is most effusive in their response? Special occasion posts—shared to honor a friend or partner’s birthday, college acceptance, anniversary, and so on—move expressions of love from the comment section to the digital main stage. Posting a series of pictures is another way to put closeness on display. The ability to easily repost content collides with special occasion posts in ways that further up the ante. Reposting means that a teen’s followers can easily see and assess how many friends posted for their birthday and how effusive those posts are. It also allows teens to signal strong ties without seeming too effortful or performative, since reposting is quick and easy.
Birthday posts can be affirming but can also become another kind of comparison quicksand (as described in chapter 2). Specifically, teens read and interpret them in comparison with other posts: why were you the only one of my friends who didn’t post for my birthday? Why did you call another friend your #1 bestie on their birthday, but only said “happy birthday to an amazing friend” on mine? Why didn’t you repost the picture I shared of us, even though you often repost others’? And: is it reasonable if this hurts my feelings?
Bashing friends is a contrast case. In gaming, teens describe the dynamic of “getting so mad at each other, but, like, having so much fun at the same time.” Banter during these moments can start out in jest, but risks crossing a line when name calling gets offensive or taunts tap into true areas of insecurity—whether they be related to the game itself (gaming skills) or irrelevant attributes (like physical appearance, or even sexual inexperience).
When Asher adds a new post, they use group text conversations to remind or compel friends to flock to the newly shared picture and begin commenting. Or, they share an Instagram Story that simply says, “LMR” (meaning: “Like My Recent”) to direct supportive followers to promptly view and respond to the newest post. Sufficient public validation from friends is part of saving face in a digital age and, again, timing matters. A delay can make one feel publicly vulnerable, like a digital version of walking into the cafeteria and being stuck at the front searching the room for friends. The impulse for social reciprocity is relevant once more. Asher needs public validation from their friends, fast, and therefore feels obligated to respond in kind.
These norms raise dilemmas for teens—like seventeen-year-old Michelle, who wants to be authentic but also doesn’t want to let down her friends. Michelle recently tapped the button to like her friend’s picture but couldn’t think of anything to comment. Almost immediately, she saw a notification that informed Michelle that her friend was typing: “She [was] like, ‘Oh, you didn’t comment on my post.’ It was literally like 30 seconds after I liked it. And I was like, ‘Okay, um, like, I’m thinking of something.’ Like, let me be. And then I have to comment like three times and it’s so annoying. And I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good. . . . There’s definitely expectations to comment on a post.”
Expressing closeness and appreciation for others is important, even essential, for healthy relationships. Social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others. For less close friends who aren’t expected commenters, commenting is an easy yet meaningful way to signal a general positive regard for the poster or a desire to be closer. “When you get a nice comment from somebody that you don’t really know or speak [to] . . . Like that’s really sweet . . . it’s kind of like establishing a connection,” teens explained. And yet, when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what’s authentic can be like reading tea leaves.
The “opportunity” to observe friends’ interactions also means today’s teens have new windows into others’ relationships. Noah sees a series of Venmo transactions between two of his friends and wonders when they started hanging out so much. Kailah monitors her ex-boyfriend’s follower count on Instagram and gets a pit in her stomach when she sees it’s jumped up by one—and then painstakingly reviews the entire list and manages to identify a cute girl as his newest follower. Again, in these ways, social media offers TMI (too much information) via a continuously updated wellspring of social information.
Digital life has obviously evolved in major ways over the last two decades. One significant shift is the rise of social media sites that are firmly tied to our offline identities. Although there are still spaces for low-stakes, anonymous “identity play,”7 many modern social media sites are places where people from all different parts of one’s offline life coexist.
Sociologists have long written about the ways that social context shapes identity expression. We generally want to be seen by others in a favorable light. At the same time, what’s authentic in one space is often inappropriate or odd in another (e.g., contrast one’s self-presentation hanging out with old friends versus on a job interview). We therefore tailor our self-presentations based on where we are and who we are with, foregrounding or concealing particular aspects of ourselves in different situations. Erving Goffman’s seminal work on self-presentation described this process as “impression management.”8
What happens, then, when people from different parts of one’s life all become social media followers? Researchers Alice Marwick and danah boyd were thought leaders in unpacking this challenge. They wrote in 2010 about how “the need for variable self-presentation is complicated by increasingly mainstream social media technologies that collapse multiple contexts and bring together commonly distinct audiences.”9 For teens, this reality is practically ensured by the social norm of accepting follow requests from everyone they know (and often friends of friends too).
Adults spend a good deal of time worrying about teens connecting with strangers, but comparably little time on the complexities of staying connected to anyone and everyone. Social media sites provide easy opportunities to stay connected and they can engender a sense of obligation to do so. Teens describe new dynamics related to keeping in touch for eternity, and even worries about not doing so (“I don’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings if I can’t stay in touch with them.”).
It’s interesting to consider these concerns in light of what we know about human social networks. Even if it’s technically possible to stay connected, evidence from research with both humans and primates indicates that we have a natural capacity to limit our social networks. There is a predictable pattern to the number of ties people maintain at different “layers” of closeness, from the most emotionally intimate (around five individuals), to those we would turn to for support when needed (around fifteen individuals) to those whom we can recognize and name (typically maxing out at around 1,500 individuals).10 “Dunbar’s number,” is named for the researcher who initially developed the theory and refers to a middle layer: the typical community size of 150 individuals with whom we can maintain stable relationships. Proponents of the social brain hypothesis (including Dunbar) argue these patterns result from cognitive constraints of our social brains, which set a kind of cap on how many relationships we can manage at different levels of time investment and intimacy. The same numerical patterns have typified social networks since the time of hunter-gatherers.11
Social networking sites make it easier to maintain more connections at a lower cost in terms of time investment. But if the very architecture of our brains is the reason we have defaulted to the same average network size throughout history, these technologies make technically possible more relationships than people can maintain. Research suggests this may be the case: even in an age of social media, even with more digital connections, the inner circle of close friends remains small. For teens in particular, Dunbar notes, “promiscuous friending” on social media can result in a heavy burden of connections, including to “anonymous ‘friends-of-friends.’”12
Large networks of weak ties have benefits. For example, if you want to share information widely or tap your network for job opportunities, it’s helpful to have thousands of “friends.”13 Yet maintaining so many digital connections can also create an overwhelming water hose of social information. This may be one reason why app features that allow for audience segmentation are so readily taken up by teens.
Indeed, in a world where social norms generate pressure to accept Follow and Friend requests from all classmates, acquaintances, and friends of friends, digitally stratifying audiences is a practical necessity. Teens who stratify audiences create their own digital versions of network layers; they also push back on context collapse that can otherwise blur boundaries between school, neighborhood, and family life.14 In so doing, they try to lessen some of the pressure that comes with impression management and create digital spaces where sharing can be more like telling a story to the friends at one’s lunch table instead of shouting through a megaphone to the whole school.
This isn’t entirely new. Social media users have for years stratified audiences by creating duplicate, more private accounts.15 By only inviting and accepting followers whom they trust and consider close friends, teens try to create protected bubbles for sharing with more openness, vulnerability, and authenticity. Now, there are digital features that facilitate segmentation. On Instagram and Snapchat, Stories are a prime place for segmenting audiences. Stories are posts that by default remain viewable for twenty-four hours, though on Instagram they can be added as a permanent part of one’s profile.16 While Stories can be shared with all followers, they can also be posted so that they’re only seen by a smaller, designated “Close Friends” group.
On Snapchat, teens curate multiple Stories that represent distinct groups. This allows them to share certain content with their besties or with friends who share certain interests, while other posts are shared with their broader networks. For example: Monet presents a polished identity for her full online audience but loves having a way to share embarrassing and silly moments with close friends. She also has separate Stories that correspond to different interests: one with soccer teammates and another where she shares music recommendations. Genevieve has a music recs Story, too, which she created after first posting to her public Story to invite anyone who wanted ongoing music recommendations to be added to a separate private, music-focused Story. It wasn’t meant to be exclusive; she just didn’t want to “spam” those in her larger audience who weren’t interested.
Izzy uses the Private Story feature on Snapchat to stratify audiences because she is gay but only out to certain friends; she has a designated Private Story where she is open about her sexual identity. Ari wants to speak out about political issues without his extended family members—who have opposing views—seeing all his posts. Using the Close Friends Story feature on Instagram offers Ari what feels like a safer space for his political expression.
Stories can be intentionally hidden from particular people too. Noa might hide from several friends a birthday post for Mari if Noa worries that the “hidden” friends would judge or disapprove of Noa’s friendship with Mari. In a context where certain kinds of expression and performance are desired and even expected, teens navigate ongoing tensions and adjust audiences for specific posts accordingly. They may very much want certain people to see a post, hence the reason for sharing it in the first place. Yet they may also have a host of reasons—from petty to perceptive—why they do not want others in their audience to see all posts.
Whether it’s on Instagram or Snapchat, being added as a viewer on another person’s Private Story can signal closeness, since it extends an invitation into parts of their sharing or posting that are, by definition, not meant for all. It also reinforces closeness since it provides access to ongoing updates and people’s whereabouts.
Stories stratify audiences in ways that can be practically useful and empowering, yet also raise friendship dilemmas. As teens add and delete friends from Private Stories, who’s in and who’s out of the inner circle is crystallized, even if it’s only temporary. However, the contents of Private Stories are by no means under lock and key. As we’ll discuss in chapter 4, screenshotting can bring a “private” update to a broader audience.
As we’ve described in prior chapters, there are clear signs that mental health issues are on the rise among youth. Documented increases in mood disorders, depressive episodes, loneliness, and suicidal thoughts and behaviors mean that even teens who are not themselves struggling are more likely than in the past to have peers who are.17 Distinct issues arise when those peers struggle in public, online.
In some cases, situations that feel like “emergencies” are social events or gossip that will be forgotten within the span of a few weeks. In other cases, they are serious and persistent issues that would be major stressors at any age: posts that signal mental health issues, family conflict, domestic violence, or health problems. Adults can be quick to lament that empathy is on the decline and to pin the blame on technology. Yet we may fail to recognize how teens’ empathy for one another is a reason why they’re tethered to their devices. It’s also a source of true burdens and digital dilemmas—especially when close friends struggle. We offer Aly and Jaylen’s story as an example (see the “When Teens Struggle in Public” box).
Aly’s unease when she saw Jaylen’s posts stemmed from the question of how to respond, but teens also struggle to determine whether they should respond. This challenge intersects with at least two open questions. First: is what they see serious enough to warrant some kind of intervention? For example, when Lila saw pictures of a friend who looked “scary thin” she wondered if that friend was struggling with an eating disorder—but she wasn’t sure if the photos warranted comment. Second: what kind of response is appropriate given a teen’s relationship (or lack thereof) with the poster? Puzzles abound when social media cries for help come from more distant acquaintances, friends of friends, or even strangers. A consequence of the shift we described in chapter 2 to more authentic and open posting is that encounters with the details of others’ struggles are more common. As another teen recounted: “I’ve seen things about people [whom I don’t know] being like, ‘Can you please give me money? I need to escape this house, like this abusive household.’ Stuff like that, and putting their Venmo in the comments [as a direct way for people to send them money] or something like that.” It can be impossible to know whether the original posters are truly in crisis or are attempting to con kind strangers.
Unsurprisingly, when peers signal distress online, cry out for help on social apps, or reach out directly for text-based support, teens feel a sense of responsibility to be available and even, as another teen put it, to “save” their friends from self-harm. Fourteen-year-old Martina described herself as acutely concerned “that I don’t have enough contact with friends who are struggling. Because I don’t want my friends to do something bad just because I didn’t respond in time to stop them from harming themselves or worse.”
Adults encourage teens to be good friends, and to embrace values like trust, kindness, empathy, and responsibility. Hidden tensions and dilemmas of a social media age make this easier said than done.
Teens wish adults would acknowledge the ways that social media and gaming help create, deepen, and sustain valued friendships. Digital life matters, whether it’s staying in close contact with “my best friend who goes to a different school” or “reconnecting with old friends.” Talking that happens while playing Fortnite or Call of Duty extends beyond it in ways that help teens “form a bond.” This can be a real win, especially for teens who are shy or socially anxious but find that digital exchanges help them build close relationships that are otherwise hard for them to establish.
For many teens, technologies are a non-negotiable for friendship preservation. There’s no way to opt out without major social repercussions. They wish adults would acknowledge this reality. “I think it would be nice if adults realized that our entire social life is linked to social media. It isn’t like when they were kids, where your social times were mostly during school. Nowadays, if you aren’t on social media a lot, you won’t have as many friends. It’s all linked to it.”
Listening to teens clarifies a core dilemma they face: what does it mean to be a good friend—or even just a compassionate person—in an age of radical connectivity? Developmentally, teen friendships are supremely important. Now, those friendships are under a social media spotlight. This raises unique puzzles for teens who feel the pressure to perform closeness or ensure sufficient validation is always freshly on display. Teens also describe how the potential for 24/7 communication raises dilemmas around availability. What happens when the desire to protect valued relationships is pitted against the desire to disconnect? (Or, in their words, when a real concern about “losing friends” means feeling “obligated to stay connected”?)
Adults tell teens to get off their phones—and often have good reasons for it. Teens want adults to recognize that sometimes they connect willingly, for fun, and out of desire. Other times, they do so out of a sense of obligation or even a sense of stress that disconnecting will mean being left out, disappointing a friend, or being seen as rude.
A final point here: adults also seem to need more nuance in how we approach the topic of online friends. It’s tempting to get stuck on the message that online strangers = danger. Teens are rightly nervous of “creepy adults” and other Internet strangers with malicious intent. But teens do connect online with “strangers” who are often peers of a similar age. Whether they’re brought together by a mutual friend or by fandom around novels, fantasy basketball, or gaming, these connections can evolve into relationships that teens define as valued friendships. As with offline friendships, they can also be sources of struggle, like when an online friend needs more support than a teen can provide. When adults think about new online connections only in terms of potential predators, we miss opportunities to offer support when teens need it.