Too Many Friends

Stosh,

We were talking a little while ago about the extent to which going away to college does or doesn't provide an opportunity to reinvent oneself. I came across an article today in the New York Times Magazine proposing that social networking sites might actually make this more difficult, since it's harder for, say, a Facebook user to make a clean break with his high school buddies.

I quote liberally from a passage that resonated strongly with me:

As a survivor of the postage-stamp era, college was my big chance to doff the roles in my family and community that I had outgrown, to reinvent myself, to get busy with the embarrassing, exciting, muddy, wonderful work of creating an adult identity. Can you really do that with your 450 closest friends watching, all tweeting to affirm ad nauseam your present self?

As Sean rightly pointed out, the pressure of one's past can be shut out from the present just by unplugging from one's old friends. I think the reason why in practice nobody ever does this is because, unlike friends who fade away in the real world just because you fail to contact them, Facebook friends hang around until you take the affirmative step of un-friending them. Nobody wants to have to take a step to affirmatively sever a social tie, except in extraordinary circumstances.

So is the mythos of college as a place for self-reinvention totally contingent upon the inconvenience of keeping up with one's old friends? And do social networking sites disrupt that inconvenience to such an extent that self-reinvention becomes too onerous to consider?

Sexting, Suicide, and So-called Sluts, but mostly just Sympathy

Three weeks ago or so, I posted a critique of Dahlia Lithwick's Slate opinion piece about teen "sexting." Today, MSNBC reports that a high school girl has committed suicide following her decision to send a nude photograph of herself to her boyfriend. Apparently, after Jessie Logan sent the picture, her boyfriend forwarded it to others, and it eventually made the rounds to literally hundreds of students. Jessie was harassed at school for months, and eventually hung herself in her closet.

I feel bad about this, I really do, but isn't it totally predictable? This is what teenagers are like. The idea that this "private picture" would have remained private is hopelessly naive. Boys who possess nude pictures of girls show them to their friends. This I know from experience, except that in my case, it was just a seventh grade friend of mine sneaking a Playboy into the back of the electronics lab. Teenagers love a victim, and they particularly love to call slut when it stands a chance of doing real damage.

Maybe there was a time when a girl could get away with this without major fallout. Like in the age of Polaroids. She could have snapped a photo and slipped it in her boyfriend's locker. Still, it might have been passed around among his friends, but no way it would have been seen by hundreds. It might have passed by word of mouth, but it would have just been plankton floating in the deep blue sea of the high school gossip, and most importantly, it would have been hearsay. She would have been teased, but she'd be able to plausibly deny having done it, and it would all blow over.

Digital media makes this sort of thing that much more dangerous because it's so easily copied and transmitted to others (and without sacrificing one's own copy). Furthermore, the ease of duplication makes the meme practically immortal for anyone who wants to get his hands on it.

What distressed me most was this passage:

The school resource officer at Sycamore [High School] said he tried to do something about Jessie’s case. He said he confronted the kids who were harassing Jessie and even took Jessie's case to the prosecutor to see if he could press charges. But he said that because Jessie was 18, there were no laws to protect her. He said he'd like to work with the Logans to have the laws changed.

She was eighteen. She was so close to college, the part of your life where you really can, if you want to, reject everything that was ever said about your high school self, and start over fresh. You can reject the prudish but titillated clique that would torture you for something like this. You can lay down roots where they've never heard of you before. And you can conduct your naive, not-even-debauched forays into sexuality with relative impunity. Put it this way: I knew sluts in college, but I didn't know anybody with "a reputation." Even if a girl was objectively easy, she wasn't a victim of that fact; she owned it, and this was true to such a degree that (since, for me anyway, the centre hasn't held) it often registered more as a strength than as a weakness. Not in every case, but often enough to warrant my saying so.

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Unrelated, but I wanted to welcome a new contributor, S. Not sure if you're going for anonymity or style on the name front. If it's the former, I need you to say so, because I don't want to accidentally "out" you by using your name, which I will most assuredly do eventually in the absence of specific instructions otherwise.

Also, good luck to Stirling at FCW.