ABSTRACT

Adolescents are forging a new path to self-development, taking advantage of the technology at their fingertips to produce desired results.

In Adolescents and Their Social Media Narratives, Walsh specifically explores how social media impacts teenagers' personal development. Indeed, through unique empirical data, Walsh presents an aspect of teen media use that is not often documented in the press—the seemingly deep and meaningful process of evaluating the self visually in an attempt to reconcile their presentation with their internal "self-story." Nevertheless, as Walsh outlines, this is not a process without its challenges.

Tracking teenagers’ progress towards self-validation from the offline stages preceding online exhibitions, this enlightening volume will appeal to undergraduate and postgraduate students, scholars, and researchers interested in fields such as Social Media Studies, Sociology of Adolescence, Identity Formation, Developmental Psychology, and Society and Technology.

chapter |19 pages

Introduction

“’cause pictures speak a lot of words”

chapter 1|26 pages

Creating the visual narrative

“It’s their highlight reel that they’re showing you”

chapter 2|21 pages

Facebook rules and boundary demarcation

chapter 3|31 pages

The gendered self-narrative

chapter 4|20 pages

The synthesis of the real and the reel me

chapter |8 pages

Conclusion

Launching the evolving self