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For teenage girls, writing about their lives online is another way to stay connected with friends
BURLINGTON - There's a lot of talk this election year about the blogosphere, about pundits opining online about this or that candidate. But here, in a suburban
While political bloggers may claim the spotlight and the big audiences, girls quietly outnumber them - and their presence is growing. The dramatic increase in the proportion of teenage Internet users with blogs - from 19 percent in late 2004 to 28 percent two years later - is propelled almost entirely by girls, according to a recent report by the Pew Internet & American Life Project. Indeed, 35 percent of teenage girls in the United States blog, Pew finds, and they account for nearly two-thirds of all teen bloggers. Other researchers have declared the teenage girl the typical blogger.
Girls who blog tend to write about their lives - about school, relationships, and life outside school. Their blogs are part diary, part soul-searching among friends, part conversation starter, more prone than boys' blogs, research suggests, to reveal emotions than merely report events.
"It's just a little easier than talking about your feelings to write about it," says Taranto, 17. "Then it's easier to talk about it."
"Agh, I don't know what I'm getting at here. I just want to feel I'm doing something right for a change." (Kalsi, March 6)
"AGH! Pretty fabulous day. The power went out during fourth period. It was fabulous." (Fritz, Jan. 11)
"all i want is everything. now whats wrong with that? i know i sound like a child but honestly im not ready to grow up yet." (Taranto, Feb. 4)
As new as blogging still feels to older generations - only 8 percent of adult Internet users have ever had a blog - the underlying instincts driving these girls are familiar.
"Girls have always kept diaries. I see a lot of this as a carryover of the working out your feelings in writing that diaries served for girls," says Susan Herring, professor of information science at Indiana University. "The peer group is paramount to teens. The fact that they're blogging with their friends is important."
The Burlington High School seniors are all active teenagers - involved in band, color guard, school musical, student newspaper, track, cheerleading, jobs - not loners substituting screen time for face time. In that way, they are typical teenage bloggers. More than a third of teens who are involved in at least three extracurricular activities keep blogs, Pew reports, compared with only one-fifth of those with no out-of-school activities.
Through their LiveJournal blogs, the Burlington girls reinforce their close friendships with one another and with classmates who also blog. They use their blogs to rollick and rant and reminisce, perhaps with less attention to the niceties of word choice and spelling and grammar than they invest in their English papers. They write about prom dresses and college acceptances and the joy of dancing to "Out Tonight" in the school parking lot. They complain about teachers and ex-boyfriends and feeling blue, sometimes using profanity for emphasis. "I apologize for the language," says their Burlington High classmate and fellow blogger Alyssa Freedman, 17. They express sides of themselves at odds with their public personas and glimpse what may not be apparent in their friends.
"We can relive the good times, and we can get inside each other's heads," says Kalsi, 18. "I think people would be surprised. A lot of people know me as really nice. I also have a mean streak, and sometimes I have to express it."
Freedman says she was "kind of shocked" when she first read some of Taranto's postings. "She's the kind of person who seems to be always happy," Freedman says. "The whole facade comes down online. She's putting on the same facade I have to put up. The same with Anita," she continues. "There's this whole world of confusion we often mask."
"i feel like there is this gaping hole that i just cant fix. i dont even know why the hole is there. i have a great family and great friends. the only thing that is missing is someone who loves me, but i dont even think that is causing this hole. it just hurts so bad sometimes." (Taranto, Jan. 30)
"well the dance was epic - Anita's word, it was fun just being with friends and just dancing crazy." (Taranto, March 2)
"So last night was terrible. I felt terribly emo, and was just not happy with anything in life. I didn't do any homework, and left all of it to be done in an impossible amount of time between classes today. Somehow, I had one of the most amazing days I have had in a very very long time. It started with a jaw-dropping encounter with an old friend. Unbelievable. I felt a part of myself had been restored." (Freedman, Feb. 1)
The Internet has been a constant presence for today's teenagers, not the next new thing it is for adults who grew up with telephones tethered to walls. These bloggers also use social networks like Facebook and post pictures and download music. They decide what to make visible for anyone who finds their sites, and what to limit to friends' eyes only. "It's part of the teenage life," says Taranto's father, Wayne. "I'm just hoping she's not revealing too much personal information."
American teens aren't the only ones blogging. "In other cultures, the tendency for teen girls to blog about their lives is even greater," Herring says. "In Poland, as early as 2002, certainly by 2003, there were articles coming out which claimed that the majority of bloggers were teenage girls and those were diary-type blogs."
In the United States, the gender gap has grown so wide that substantially more young teenage girls blog than older boys. Almost one-third of girls age 12-14 have blogs, Pew reports, compared to 18 percent of boys age 15-17.
The gender differences in teens' blogs "look like the gender differences you see when you see girls and boys hanging out in malls or parks. You see different notions of machismo and femininity and masculinity," says Danah Boyd, a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center for the Internet & Society. "Teenagers know they're being read by a small number of close friends. They're always aware of the audience. To the degree that blogs are about identity development, it's not the pure self-reflective identity development. It's much more the interactive identity development."
Blogs also open a window into teenagers' lives to adults who happen on them.
"It used to be you went to school all day with your friends and talked to them all night on the phone," says Lois Ann Scheidt, an Indiana University doctoral candidate who studies blogging. "With kids online, it's the first time we as adults have been able to take a quiet seat in the back of the room and watch them without impacting their activities."
"Well, I think I had a little too much fun last night. It was so glorious. I went to
"I'm very sick of everything right now and everyone (well, not everyone, but I feel like being melodramatic like everyon else, so shut up). People insist on being overly dramatic, and all I want is to be happy about something right now. Anything." (Kalsi, March 6)
"I am no longer afraid to be myself." (Fritz, Dec. 17, 2007)
"I feel as if I am going through each day watching someone who looks, acts, talks, and thinks just like me live my life for me." Freedman uses her blog, in part, to wrestle with the bouts of depression she suffers, to tell her friends that "I feel cold, empty, and hopeless," as she blogged on Feb. 24. "I would get so sick of complaining. That's why I went to LiveJournal. I would write when I'm upset," Freedman says. "Another reason I use LiveJournal, I'm the one everyone comes to, but I'm scared to bring my problems to other people." The bloggers straddle the boundary between public and private, allowing only "friends" access to their more intimate musings. Some save their most personal thoughts for the paper diaries they also keep. "There are some things I don't want my friends to know," says Fritz, 18, "but eventually I tell them." Some of Kalsi's private postings so concerned a friend that she sought the intervention of a school counselor. "I was, 'I hated my life. I'm so miserable.' I was 15," Kalsi says. "I wanted people to talk to me about it, but I didn't want it taken that far." The girls leave Starbucks for the mall, and later, at home, they check LiveJournal. "Whatever is going on in my head, I'll get it out," Taranto says. "It's another way to feel connected to everybody."
