“May the Whole World See My Body”: Sharing and Rating Pictures on the Internet Amongst Teenage Girls

• In Event: The Media, the Body, and the Self

Abstract

The starting point of our project is a Facebook group that invited young people and specifically teenage girls to upload pictures of themselves and rank the uploaded pictures on a range of 1-10. In the wake of the media panic that ensued, this paper draws on 6 focus groups, conducted with teenage girls aged 15-18 in July 2013, to explore how girls – participants, lurkers and other members of contemporary culture – discuss their visual social media practices, articulate their do's and don'ts in this context, and consider the consequences of girls' participation in this both explicit and metaphoric site of expression and oppression. We suggest that ironically, the very explicitness of the economy of visibility in the ranking groups crystalizes for the girls the price tag for each choice that they make, the double standard that underlies this economy – as well as their ability to tease and to challenge it.

Authors

• Rivka Ribak, U of Haifa

• Shosh Davidson, Gordon Teachers College