writer Douglas Rushkoff went to Montclair to talk to teenagers about their role in building brands. “When a kid likes something online,” Rushkoff said on-air, “a product or a brand or a celebrity, it becomes part of the identity that they broadcast to the world, the way a T-shirt or a bedroom poster defined me when I was a teen. For kids today, you are what you like…And guess what? Getting people to be ‘all about’ something is big business.” Including the business of social media itself—the more active users are, the more data about them social media companies can collect, and the higher they are valued, as they can then sell the data to other companies. “That’s why companies need kids to stay online, clicking and liking and tweeting,” Rushkoff told a group of Montclair high school students.
But the
Frontline
segment didn’t touch upon why kids seek likes for themselves—or how their methods often mirror the very techniques companies use to market brands. The girls in Montclair said, for example, that they planned what time of day they posted, trying to hit prime times for getting likes—another central tenet of social media marketing. On the
Frontline
segment,
New York Times
writer Brooks Barnes talked about the “day by day, hour by hour” social media marketing strategy he witnessed in covering the marketing of
The Hunger Games
in 2012: “The goal is to create a controlled brushfire online.”
“I always find a good time to post,” Melinda said. “You don’t want to post in the middle of the night when no one sees it. I was on vacation and there was a time difference, so I would literally stay up to two in the morning so I could post pictures at a certain time so more people here would like them. My mom was like, What are you doing?”
Melinda and Victoria told of how they had gone to a Katy Perry concert together and posted on Instagram almost identical pictures of Perry performing onstage, but Melinda’s pictures had gotten more likes, because she had posted them at a more desirable time.
“I thought it meant people liked Melinda better,” Victoria said.
“Oh, no, it’s just because of when I posted,” Melinda reassured her. “I’m obsessed with getting more likes than other people—I’m always comparing myself to see how many likes my photo got. I’ll post a picture on Instagram and immediately start checking.”
The captions that went with their posts were also a source of forethought, sometimes requiring a groupthink, like a brainstorming session on
Mad Men
—how to make them sound witty and clever?
“I work so hard on my captions,” Riley said. “Everyone has that one group chat where they’re like, Oh my God, help me with my captions, what should my caption be?”
The location of their photos was a crucial consideration as well. “I go to the woods to get really artsy lighting and stuff,” said Sophia.
“You’ll ask the people in your group chat, Should this be my location? What should I do?” said Riley.
“You get more likes if you’re someplace cool,” Melinda explained.
“It’s called ‘good feed,’ ” Sophia said, “if you take good photos and use filters and a VSCO Cam,” a spiffy camera and editing app, “and like, have like really good captions.”
They said the most admired style of feed among their friends was the one they called “artsy” or “aesthetic.” The “aesthetic” aesthetic evolved in the late 2000s with the 2007 advent of Tumblr and other sites devoted to the posting of one’s own art, as well as aggregated images of art and fashion and photography. It’s used to describe a sense that social media posting
is
art—or can be art, if it’s “aesthetic” enough. (Not to be confused with, although perhaps related to, the “New Aesthetic” concept introduced by British artist and writer James Bridle in 2011 to describe the response to technology by artists working in the digital age.)
“You can, like, post a
But the
Frontline
segment didn’t touch upon why kids seek likes for themselves—or how their methods often mirror the very techniques companies use to market brands. The girls in Montclair said, for example, that they planned what time of day they posted, trying to hit prime times for getting likes—another central tenet of social media marketing. On the
Frontline
segment,
New York Times
writer Brooks Barnes talked about the “day by day, hour by hour” social media marketing strategy he witnessed in covering the marketing of
The Hunger Games
in 2012: “The goal is to create a controlled brushfire online.”
“I always find a good time to post,” Melinda said. “You don’t want to post in the middle of the night when no one sees it. I was on vacation and there was a time difference, so I would literally stay up to two in the morning so I could post pictures at a certain time so more people here would like them. My mom was like, What are you doing?”
Melinda and Victoria told of how they had gone to a Katy Perry concert together and posted on Instagram almost identical pictures of Perry performing onstage, but Melinda’s pictures had gotten more likes, because she had posted them at a more desirable time.
“I thought it meant people liked Melinda better,” Victoria said.
“Oh, no, it’s just because of when I posted,” Melinda reassured her. “I’m obsessed with getting more likes than other people—I’m always comparing myself to see how many likes my photo got. I’ll post a picture on Instagram and immediately start checking.”
The captions that went with their posts were also a source of forethought, sometimes requiring a groupthink, like a brainstorming session on
Mad Men
—how to make them sound witty and clever?
“I work so hard on my captions,” Riley said. “Everyone has that one group chat where they’re like, Oh my God, help me with my captions, what should my caption be?”
The location of their photos was a crucial consideration as well. “I go to the woods to get really artsy lighting and stuff,” said Sophia.
“You’ll ask the people in your group chat, Should this be my location? What should I do?” said Riley.
“You get more likes if you’re someplace cool,” Melinda explained.
“It’s called ‘good feed,’ ” Sophia said, “if you take good photos and use filters and a VSCO Cam,” a spiffy camera and editing app, “and like, have like really good captions.”
They said the most admired style of feed among their friends was the one they called “artsy” or “aesthetic.” The “aesthetic” aesthetic evolved in the late 2000s with the 2007 advent of Tumblr and other sites devoted to the posting of one’s own art, as well as aggregated images of art and fashion and photography. It’s used to describe a sense that social media posting
is
art—or can be art, if it’s “aesthetic” enough. (Not to be confused with, although perhaps related to, the “New Aesthetic” concept introduced by British artist and writer James Bridle in 2011 to describe the response to technology by artists working in the digital age.)
“You can, like, post a
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