That seems easy enough, but given the abundance of crisis managers and image consultants, and the financial gains from having clout and virality, how do you know if someone is being genuine? And given how well emotional content performs online, what does that do to our ability to engage with one another in person?
The age of ‘McVulnerability’
These days, authentic vulnerability is hard to come by, said Maytal Eyal, a psychologist and writer.
People’s experiences with vulnerability, or lack-thereof, are also making for quick growing parasocial relationships. Anyone with a phone can turn to social media to get their quick fix of synthetic and performative vulnerability, a phenomenon Eyal calls “McVulnerability.”
It’s “comfortable and easy and cheap, but ultimately like fast food, [McVulnerability is] not necessarily good for your health,” Eyal continued, especially during these times of increasing loneliness. “Social media platforms have presented something to us that’s both really insidious and really brilliant where people no longer need to access real vulnerability in person,” she said.
Add to that, adolescents are spending more and more time online. And although it’s difficult to pin down the exact effects of social media on teens, studies show that teens’ mental health is declining and their in-person socialization has dropped dramatically in the last few decades.
So what happens to teens when they are viewing McVulnerability?
Ultimately, the more hours spent online — and therefore, more potential time viewing McVulnerability — the more teens are disengaged from social activities that build their relational intimacy skills, said Eyal. “The consequences are dire because vulnerability and the discomfort within it are inherent to forming intimate relationships with others…without vulnerability, we have no intimacy,” she added.
Instead of going to parties and chasing romance, teens are spending more of their free time on their phones, said Eyal, who works with teens and their families through her private practice. This behavior is not unique to teens – adults are doing this too – but the adolescent period is critical to the development of social skills, vulnerability and empathy.
Teens are undergoing enormous neurological changes during adolescence and are extremely sensitive to how they fit into their social settings, compared to younger kids and older adults, said Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, a neuroscientist at USC’s Rossier School of Education and author of “Emotions, Learning, and the Brain.” Adolescents also tend to be reactive, and when they don’t feel safe, it’s really hard for them to be vulnerable, Immordino-Yang continued.
When schools aren’t safe places and don’t focus on giving students ample time to draw on all of their developing empathy and social skills, teens can respond to serious prompts in unserious ways, said Immordino-Yang.
Take, for example, a classroom lesson on a civil rights march, in which the participants fight for a change that’s meaningful to them, she continued. A teen who isn’t familiar yet with the Civil Rights Movement might not be too impressed by what meets the eye, such as registering people to vote.
Immordino-Yang’s research team found that adolescents took longer to think through complex stories and ideas.
But given a safe space and enough time, that teen would be more inclined to abandon their adolescent fear of judgement and social status and inquire for more information, revealing their inherent curiosity.
When teens inquire to learn more, they are building valuable skills for adulthood, like expanding their contextual knowledge. This deeper, more complex type of thinking is called transcendent thinking, and according to Immordino-Yang, teens want to get there, but it takes work.
Immordino-Yang also recommends setting a calm tone in the classroom in order to provide a space where teens can explore big ideas. When adolescents are allowed to think deeply about an issue that matters to them, and then back up and learn more about how to solve that issue, they are more likely to ditch the performative responses and tap into their newly developing vulnerability. According to Immordino-Yang, transcendent thinking – like thinking about the values, intentions and implications of more complex ideas – doesn’t just help young people better understand the world around them, this type of thinking actually grows their brains.
“In other words, they are literally exercising their brain like a muscle when they think about these bigger, more complex, hidden ethical ideas,” Immordino-Yang continued.
A Retreat From Discomfort
According to Eyal, teens aren’t learning how to express their vulnerability with their peers like they used to, and instead they’re “bombarded by vulnerability content” online which doesn’t require a response.
The teens that Eyal works with are aware that what they view on social media is synthetic to some degree. The bigger issue is that teens get to hide behind their parasocial relationships and skip out on the discomfort of in-person vulnerability and IRL confrontation, she said. “It’s almost like a retreat from discomfort,” Eyal continued.
Of course, teens don’t just scroll on social media, they post there too. Eyal has found that a lot of her teen clients are deeply fearful of exposing their own vulnerabilities to their peers in person, but find it much easier to do so online. According to Eyal, this is a different form of McVulnerability that also procures a lack of reciprocity, but isn’t as far reaching as a tearful influencer apology might be. She said that vulnerable posts from teens online take away the “tender, awkward waiting experience that happens in person with a real vulnerability exchange.”
J’Nyah is pretty confident in her ability to navigate online spaces, but even so it can be hard for her to decipher her friends’ posts on social media, especially when they don’t reflect their behavior or mood in school. With abbreviations like KMS (kill myself) tossed around nonchalantly, J’Nyah makes sure to check-in with her friends in-person when she sees them posting concerning things on social media.
The line between right and wrong can get easily blurred online, especially for young people who are broadening their social skills and refining their relational identities. When online behavior goes too far, there’s often a waiting period for J’Nyah, and it isn’t until days or weeks later when her suspicions about a questionable piece of content are confirmed that she’s able to be sure about the information that’s been presented to her. Other online content are more obviously nefarious to J’Nyah, like someone recording and posting themselves being rude to patrons and employees at stores.
J’Nyah also pointed out that people on social media tend to act in more extreme ways because they feel protected behind a screen. And there are negative consequences, said J’Nyah. Trends like the “devious lick” trend encouraged middle and high schoolers to steal and vandalize school property, costing some schools across the country thousands of dollars in damages. “I think things sometimes just go too far,” and “I feel like I’ve just been desensitized to a lot of things,” J’Nyah added.
In order to combat becoming too comfortable behind a screen, Eyal encourages her teen clients to seek out healthy discomfort away from their devices like being a camp counselor for the summer where they might be responsible for younger kids, spend a lot of time outdoors and be required to do some form of physical labor.
“Put them in situations where they might feel nervous and shy and out of their element socially, or put them in a situation where maybe they have to be among a group of other kids,” and away from their phones, she said.
While teens might think it’s more comfortable to escape behind screens, it’s important that parents show them that they can find meaning and value in the temporary discomfort of unfamiliar social settings and activities.
Issues with empathy
Teachers might question their students’ capacity for empathy when they laugh during a lesson about the Holocaust, or crack an inappropriate joke while learning about the Jim Crow South. And these concerns from adults can be rooted in worries surrounding increased social media use by teens. But to Eyal, these reactions “sound so developmentally normal” because teens are experimenting with and learning how to express their emotions. Adolescents experience an immense amount of self-consciousness about how they are perceived by their peers and responding to a serious topic in an emotionally incongruent way is a way to avoid discomfort and vulnerability, she said.
In these instances, teens’ neurological immaturity is on display. According to Immordino-Yang, teens sometimes express an emotion before processing the appropriateness given the context, but this is also a social response. “I don’t think they’d laugh if they were alone,” said Immordino-Yang.
Teens are also learning how and when to apply transcendent thinking, and get it wrong sometimes, said Immordino-Yang. “They often think of very deep things in superficial ways…or they think of superficial things in quite deep ways.” When patterns of thinking are exercised over and over again, like hours scrolling through social media, those patterns stick, Immordino-Yang continued. So viewing McVulnerability online very often “is likely to change the way you see things in school too; I mean, your mind comes with you wherever you go and it’s built by the way in which you use it,” she added.
For parents concerned about their teens viewing McVulnerability online, Immordino-Yang suggested watching those videos with them, and talking to them about it. Asking questions like: Why do you think this person is acting like this? Or, what is their motive for posting this content for millions of people online?
“Help them to start to query what you, as an adult, are capable of noticing about the bigger picture,” said Immordino-Yang. Remember that your teen doesn’t have to agree with what you are saying, she continued; learning to unpack the things that you are viewing rather than letting those things drive your attention and future decisions is important.
“Engaging with [online] media is a great way to learn things. It’s a great way to be exposed to things that are outside your immediate sphere of influence,” added Immordino-Yang.