Aimee Rickman: Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration: US Teens’ Use of Social Media to Negotiate Offline Struggles

Aimee Rickman’s Adolescence, Girlhood, and Media Migration attempts to understand how teenagers, specifically teenaged girls in rural settings, use social media and to what extent it mediates the misunderstandings they experience as adolescents. She demonstrates how complex emotions and social structures like isolation, surveillance, popularity, privacy, and social engagement pushed adolescents to social media. There they built unique and multifaceted identities that were not shown to or understood by adults in their real life. Adolescence is seen as a time of becoming, where one is not competent or worthy of having freedoms allotted to adults. Rickman’s goal is to show everyone that teenagers are complete human beings; they are not in a state of becoming, they just are. Her view into the lives of rural teenagers is touching and brings to light many of the struggles that isolation and constant surveillance procure. By looking into how teenagers interact within the open space of social media, Rickman garners empathy and support for teenagers that seek independence and autonomy though online spaces. …