American Girls Article Analysis Essay

Introduction

In short, the article is about the social media and the secret lives of teenagers. Nancy Jo Sales talks to many teenage girls concerning their experiences in the social media while online and off. Sales observe that "These teenagers come up in a hypersexualized culture which encourages the adoption of extreme behaviors among them such as watching pornographic images and videos as well as exchanging their nude photographs" (Sales, Nancy J. 65). "The culture," remarks Sales, "rife with a virally peculiar strain of sexism" (Sales, Nancy J. 65). Teenage girls spend a lot of their time on the current technology and so much concentration on social media that they cannot learn the necessary skills of communication.

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The lives of many teenage girls in the United States of America today lies on social media platforms such as the Instagram, Tinder, Ask.fm, Vine, YouTube, Whisper, Twitter, and Facebook. In these platforms, Sales observes, "the girls have developed various behaviors and attitudes which push them into behaving in certain ways" (Sales, Nancy J. 215). The social media has dominated the minds of these girls in such a way that they want to appear perfectly in the social media. Their desires are so much saturated with the fallacy that all they think is online perfection. Social media consumes much of their time. Every moment, they want to get updated with the latest posts from other users. Reading through the posts and thinking about what the best thing should post about on their accounts.

Most advertisers use various social media platforms to create awareness about the products they sell. To grab the attention of most people, they use very beautiful images and videos which captures everyone's desire to direct them to the main product being advertised. Advertisements in the social media have enormous impacts on the self-esteem of these girls, as they try to look like the people with beautiful pictures in the social media (Sales, Nancy J. 74). The more time these girls spend on the social media platforms, comparing themselves to others, the more depressed they become.

The teenage girls spend much of their time admiring others in the social media. The smiling selfies are showing perfectly applied makeups with matching dress-code. The images are normally fantastic to see. Hence, most of the time, these teenage girls stay online trying to learn about the latest fashions and designs and admiring them. The admiration then translates to comparing themselves with those that they want to be like. They fail to think that the experts, not real life carefully orchestrate a lot of what they see in the social media such as fine images and lucrative lifestyles of the celebrities. In pursuit of perfection, these girls end up despising themselves with the feelings of inadequacy and self-sympathy.

Furthermore, the quest for likes has made it so much hurtful for these teenage girls. They do all they can think possible to attract as many public likes as possible in the Facebook. The likes equate with their self-worth. According to one of the girls that Sales talked to, she said, "I feel anxious about how many likes for my post" (Sales, Nancy J. 186). It is a popularity contest in the social media whereby, we feel rejected if our post does not get many likes. The more likes accrued from a post, the higher the resultant feeling of self-confidence.

Conclusion

Social media interrupts the healthy life relations such as hanging out with friends, watching the bustle of the outside world, or even doing constructive work. The teenage girls end up not engaged in the healthy activities of life because their attention is on documenting them to look interesting on social media. Such kind of voyeuristic life makes these girls susceptible to numerous adverse consequences such as the interrupted sleep cycle, eating disorders, or even depression. The teenage girls prefer to stay online most of the time, sometimes until very late into the night, browsing through various social media platforms. As a result, these girls may fail to get enough sleep leading to sleeping disorders.