Dear Emma…
I begged my mother to let me make a Facebook account. Everyone in my middle school was on it by grade seven and I wasn’t allowed to open up my own account in the summer before I started high school. I remember being nervous as I filled out all my information, but I don’t remember exactly why. It probably had something to do with putting myself online, showing my face to the internet. I know I was excited to finally be making an account and being part of an online world that wasn’t something reserved for younger people like Club Penguin (RIP). It felt very grown-up, and I quickly got swept up in it.
Using social media for professional reasons had never even occurred to me. I knew that sometimes when you were applying for a job your accounts would get checked out for inappropriate content, but I never considered personal branding until University. Social media was just for fun, to keep up with old friends, but it’s become so much more than that. The idea that it can make or break a person or a company is kind of scary. It has taken me a LONG time to get my accounts to a place where I feel like they represent me pretty well. There are several things I wish that baby Emma knew before she put herself out there.
- Please don’t document your every thought. Please.
I had some real cringe-worthy posts on my Facebook. No one needed to know how I felt about the weather. No one needed to know what I was up to on a Friday evening — which was honestly nothing. I posted about how I had literally nothing to do — but I seemed to be under the impression it was important news. This only got worse when I got on Twitter. Yikes. Thank God for sites like Cardigan, otherwise it would still contain many of baby Emma’s tweets in ALL CAPITALS about things like BOYS and TWEEN ANGST.
2. Don’t get caught up in the online drama.
High school is difficult enough without the added pressure of social media. It’s so weird to think back now on how peoples’ Instagram accounts partially dictated the social hierarchy of my school. Since everyone was online, it was almost like you never left the social aspect of school when you left the building. You were constantly interacting with each other, there wasn’t really a way to escape it. That had its positive sides, but it definitely came with negatives too.
Twitter was a pretty big thing then, at least it was in my school, and subtweets were a pretty dangerous game. Kids could say anything about anyone and not get in trouble because there was no way to prove that it was actually about a specific person. This public call out could be humiliating, because the person it was about was meant to know.
I can distinctly remember reading a Tweet and knowing it was about me. With tears in my eyes and a heart sunk with anger and teen angst I hit the like button. Why? Why did I do that? I allowed myself to engage with it, and I wish I never had. It allowed the person who wrote the tweet some satisfaction in knowing I had read it, that it had affected me. Did liking it make me feel any better? No.
3. Don’t go on Ask.fm. Don’t.
A website where people can anonymously say anything to you? What could possibly go wrong?
Seriously, that’s a bad move.
4. Be mindful of what motivates people to post certain things, and handle it accordingly.
While you can’t let yourself get caught up in the pettiness of social media, it’s also important not to let something that’s occurred online take away the seriousness of a real issue.
I can remember one Halloween when a group of boys posted a picture on Twitter of two girls’ costumes at school. The boys captioned it as a public call out, labeling the girls as sluts for the length of their skirts. It got a lot of attention online at our school, with responses both supporting the post and others demanding it be taken down.
The post was eventually removed, but the boys that posted it weren’t penalized any further than that, to my knowledge. I think they were given a talk and a warning. They weren’t punished for disrespecting those girls, but for posting it on the internet. It sent a message to all of us, that as long as it was online, it was ‘harmless’, which isn’t necessarily true. Those boys were motivated to post that based on stereotypes and ideas about the female body that have gone on far too long.
I still wish that incident had opened up a conversation about policing the bodies of young women, and bullying both online and IRL.
5. It’s not going to make you feel better about yourself.
In fact, it will probably make you feel worse.
I was a really self-conscious, lonely kid for the better part of my school life. High school is hard enough without the added pressure of being on social media. It becomes social expectation to post pictures of yourself for the entire online world to see. Nine out of ten times, people are going to be nice about it, but what about when they aren’t? That’s crushing for a kid in high school.
You have to think really critically When you share a picture of yourself, and the likes start flooding in, what is that really doing for you? I kind of like to think of baby Emma as a dam that’s got cracks in it. All that instant gratification and all those likes were just plugging up cracks as they sprung up until the whole thing burst. Social media doesn’t teach you how to love and appreciate and be kind to yourself, it makes you portray a version of you that feels that way. That’s not healthy.
That’s five things I wish baby Emma had known before making all those social media accounts. I sometimes think that my brother has the right idea by staying off of it altogether — except for his Instagram photography account which you should follow.
But then I think of the opportunities that have come to me via my social media, and I’m really glad I continue to be online. It’s just a matter of taking care of yourself when you’re on your accounts, but I wrote a different post about that.
