Do You Like This Story? Or, Slouching Toward Validation
My apologies in advance: I’ve been mulling over different ways to make today’s column funny, and it’s just not working. I’ll get back to the humor next time, but for today, please put your phones down and look at your children. Really look at them. And say something kind to them while you’re at it. Tell them how very proud of them you are.
I receive a lot of pitches for new apps, and while most are not a good fit for Buzzology (which mainly deals with viral online culture), a recent one called Get Me Rated caught my eye. The concept is very simple: After starting an account on your smartphone, you can upload photos of anything you want and ask other members how they like what you’re displaying. Most of these requests appear, to my eyes, to be desperate cries for attention.
Not surprisingly, the 700,000 fans that Get Me Rated has managed to pick up since its launch at the end of 2012 are predominantly female and in the 15-24 age range. They’re at that difficult age—leaving the cocoons of high school and college—where making friends is just not as easy as it used to be. Most social media is geared toward the pressures of dating, and parents (and their friends) are taking over Facebook. Get Me Rated co-founder Kelsey Greenberg says her service is a place where young people can go to simply branch out socially. (There’s also the Grumpy Mom Solution: Try college and the real world. Would it kill you to get out a little once in a while?)
So I tried to write a funny column about how young people increasingly turn to strangers on the Internet for validation and self-esteem, but the news just isn’t funny. It hasn’t been for a while. Get Me Rated serves as evidence that we, as a species, are finally face-planting on the ocean floor of the deep and murky waters of narcissism and being tossed about in the whirling eddies of stranger danger, if you catch my watery drift. We’re paying less attention to how our kids are feeling and, in turn, our children are seeking the validation they so badly need from strangers who might not have their best interests at heart.
Maybe I have a problem with this because I’m a mom to two teenagers and my heart breaks for the young people who are experiencing the rocky road through adolescence in the most public way possible, with their entire lives spread across the Internet. Maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember a time when our sense of “self” evolved in the safe haven of our family units, as opposed to the fast and dangerous world of pixelated strangers. Maybe we should all just put our phones down and really look at one another again. I know that’s not a traditional philosophy for a tech columnist, but this is important.
Why would young people turn to strangers—who feel to the young and naïve like oddly intimate friends after a few quick exchanges via an app like Snapchat or Get Me Rated—to “give and receive love” as the app advertises, when they have trusted family members and real-life friends to give them the same validation? Where have these people, so important in the life of an emergent personality, gone?
I’ll tell you where they’ve gone. They’re posting photos of their latest cocktail on Facebook, which is where the kids used to be until we oldsters took it over and made fools of ourselves. We had a chance to interact with them on their own online turf, and we blew it.
Greenberg’s take on all this—and in my opinion, it’s a young take at that—is that while parents are “supposed to like my stuff, because they’re my [parents], it means more when a stranger walks up to you on the street and says, ‘Hey, I really like your shoes.’ ” So because our social interactions are more limited now than they used to be when community meant more than just an online group of people, young people with a fragile sense of self put more stock in a stranger’s opinion.
I was curious, so I started a Get Me Rated account, perversely naming it eastgermanjudge after the Olympics judge who low-balled other countries’ scores to give his own country an edge. The first photo I put up was of my dog, which I honestly thought might garner quite a few ratings because she’s just so darned cute.
After about 24 hours, however, she had been rated only twice, so I put up a nice picture of some “family rules” artwork that hangs in my living room and, to see if people were truly desperate to send me some love, a photo of my lucky crossword puzzle pencil.
After 48 hours, I had garnered only the absolute minimum of love. Obviously, I’m doing something wrong. I know, I’ll post a photo of my new shoes!
That got a couple of ratings right away, because, come on: SHOES. Either that, or Get Me Rated has a good number of foot fetishists.
Maybe, just maybe, this might be useful if there is no real-life friend, no relative, no neighbor who can tell you whether the new shoes you just spent most of your paycheck on are worth the money. But my Significant Other, who passed me in the living room as I was photographing my feet and uploading the photo to a website, thought it was just weird.
“You want total strangers to tell you whether your shoes are nice?” he asked. “Don’t you like them? Why did you buy them, then?”
Good point. I put down my phone and went into my son’s room.
“Why are you wearing high heels in the house?” he asked as I wobbled my way over to him.
“I don’t know, I just wanted to try them on,” I said, sitting next to him. “So how’s it going? Everything OK with you? That’s a very nice hoodie you have on…”
Is there something weirdly popular on the Internet that you’d like explained? Write to Deb Amlen at buzzologyYT@yahoo.com and let her know. Follow her on Facebook and Twitter (@debamlen).
