American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers by Nancy Jo Sales

Author:Nancy Jo Sales [Sales, Nancy Jo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780385353922
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-22T23:00:00+00:00

Los Angeles, California

When I returned to my hotel that night after talking with the girls at the Grove, we started exchanging messages on Facebook. They were having a birthday-party sleepover (it was Melissa’s birthday), so they would type something on the thread and disappear and then return. When I asked them what they were doing, Padma said, “Having cake.” Greta said, “Of course we’re all on our phones.” Whenever they were free, they would tell me more about their experiences on social media.

“O.K. so my freshman year of high school,” Padma wrote, “this sophomore Jaden (ya I regret even his stupid name) messages me on Facebook saying, Hi, because he knows me through mutual friends, and he would talk to me every single day. And one day he asked for my phone number and because I talked to him so much and got to know him I gave it to him. And so then we were texting and he asked if it was going anywhere, like what type of relationship, and I asked him back, and he said he would like a relationship with me, so I said we could try. And that led to us being kinda flirty and talking in person and seeing each other round school, and then he kinda kissed me and then he told everyone else that I kissed him and all he wanted was a hug.

“And I was beyond pissed at him,” Padma wrote, “because of all the lies he told me and I still hate him to this day…And at the time he was telling me all his ‘feelings’? He did the same thing to two other girls. And he hurt me so bad that I made Melissa talk to him, to hurt him, like to get a little taste of his own medicine. But then he ended up doing the same thing to her and he caused friction with us as friends.

“And he still does cause friction between us,” Padma wrote, “and he’s now a major man whore and he needs to leave my school because he has hurt so many girls that I didn’t know of before. I’ve blocked him on Facebook and deleted his number.”

“Last year,” Melissa wrote, taking up Padma’s story, “I met Jaden through Padma. She liked him. Later he hurt her and lied about kissing her. I wanted to help her. So to help her get back at him, I added him as a friend and started talking to him on Facebook. I was planning to play him the way he played Padma and a bunch of other girls. We talked every day for months and he ended up asking me out. So then I started ignoring him and going offline whenever he started to message me. I was messing with him the best way I could…

“But after a while,” Melissa said, “I fell for him too.” Why? “I don’t know…We had a thing for a while. We talked every day, and he called me every night to say goodnight.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.